Darfurnica, Nadia Plesner, 2010

Darfurnica: Casualties

in the Intellectual Property Wars

Editor’s note:

Presented in the this month’s edition is a piece sent in by Leon Tan. It’s a twist on the integration of  art, power and politics – a relationship not always complementary, and one with us as long as we humans have been entertaining any notions of society. The details and nuances of the relationship tend to tell us a significant amount about what is and isn’t happening in our times, and Tan’s submission is no exception. So take a read and let us know in your low or high brow opinion the thoughts that his piece evokes. And keep an eye toward the September/October edition, as we will be featuring another ‘art to politics’ article with a focus on the musical group, The Rooftop Revolutionaries.

— Jim Palombo, politics editor

by Leon Tan, Ph. D.

The painting, Darfunica, by Danish artist Nadia Plesner (based in the Netherlands) is conceived in homage to Picasso’s 1937 painting Guernica. It is also an expression of political claims by the artist, who makes the point that the obsession with Hollywood celebrities in popular news media means that genocide in Darfur (or any number of places) could take place without even making the headlines. Plesner finds this situation unacceptable, explaining her painting as follows: “In Darfurnica I have mixed some of the horrible stories I have learned about Darfur over the past years with some of the Hollywood gossip stories which made headlines during the same time period.” The idea, it seems, is to juxtapose the luxury world of Hollywood celebrity with the horrors of Darfur’s ongoing civil war.

Darfurnica came to my attention only because of my interest in issues of copyright. As it happens, the artist and work are at the centre of a legal battle initiated by LouisVuitton, who objects to the bag being carried by the boy in the middle of the painting. Louis Vuitton alleges that the use of the LV pattern on the bag constitutes infringement of its intellectual property rights. On 27 January 2011, Louis Vuitton obtained an ex parte court order against Nadia Plesner from the Court of The Hague.

On her website (http://www.nadiaplesner.com/), Plesner counters Louis Vuitton’sclaim by asserting that the court order violates her rights to free speech and artistic freedom under Section 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR). In this case, Plesner is correct, as Section 10 does in fact guarantee freedom of expression, which specifically includes non-interference by public authorities. In fact, the court order also violates Articles 18 and 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, not to mention the right to participation in cultural life specified in the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).

Conveniently ignored until very recently in the contentious politics of intellectual property, the conflict between intellectual property legislation on one hand, and human and cultural rights legislation on the other, deserves greater scrutiny. For legal institutions have in the main apparently forgotten the existence of such rights and frameworks under continuous lobbying pressure from ruthless corporate oligopolies. A related case in Sweden involves the Swedish government prosecuting organizers behind The Pirate Bay, under direct pressure from the U.S. government and a predominantly American media oligopoly (Tan, 2010). At no time did the Swedish court pause to reflect on its own violations of international frameworks such as the UDHR and ICESCR, not to mention the ECHR.

As a matter of fact, ‘The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has previously recommended that every state conduct a general human rights impact assessment of their IP regimes.’ (Shaver and Sganga, 2009) No mention has yet been made by the courts in either the Netherlands or Sweden of any such assessment. It is timely therefore, for legal institutions to educate themselves concerning their own obligations under the aforementioned frameworks for human and cultural rights, and to cease delaying rigorous human rights impact assessments on national, regional and international intellectual property frameworks. In the meantime, it is encouraging to see that Plesner filed her own lawsuit against Louis Vuitton to have the order lifted.

References:

Leon Tan, ‘The Pirate Bay: Countervailing power and the problem of state organized crime,” CTheory: Theory, Technology and Culture, 2010, 33(3).

Lea Shaver and Caterina Sganga, ‘The right to take part in cultural life: On copyrightand human rights,’ Wisconsin International Law Journal, 2009, 27.

About the author:

Leon Tan (PhD) is an Art Historian specializing in aesthetics, social theory, contemporary art, and the history of networked art and media. He previously lectured in Art History and Psychotherapy in New Zealand, before relocating for part of the year to Sweden in 2009.

©2011 Shawn Huckins

Portrait of An American Family

“An American Revolution Revolution”:

What would George post?

An interview with Shawn Huckins

By Mike Foldes

The following interview took place by e-mail exchanges in June 2011.

Q: What initially prompted your series of “Revolution” paintings?

Shawn Huckins: I’ve always had a fascination with the American Revolution, ever since learning about it in elementary school.  Not just the political aspect, but the way of life, the architecture, the food, the clothes, the fife and drums, and of course the art.  So their way of living has always been in the back of my mind.  I always wonder to myself what it must have been like to not worry about computers, cell phones, cars, and the list can go on and on —  So this initially prompted the series, combining two different worlds.  You are constantly bombarded with modern technology that at first it may seem wonderful and beneficial, but in the long run, makes us drift apart and makes us set our priorities in different places.  I wanted a comical aspect to my work, but also make a statement.

Q: Are they oil or acrylic paintings? If not, what medium? Mixed media? Canvas or board?

A: All of my work is acrylic.  Some are on canvas, some panel.

Q: How did you select the subject paintings that you eventually metamorphosed?

A: There are numerous factors when choosing a painting that I will eventually replicate.  Some things of concern are picture quality … normally, I would photograph the painting myself with a series a detail shots, just so I can retain the original artist’s work as closely as possible.  Second, if I myself think the work is of good composition/color.  Some portraits just speak to me more than others.  I find the work of Copley very inspiring because I work in a very meticulous manner, trying to create an almost photorealistic quality to my work.  My early work borders on realism, so portraits that have a realistic quality to them, I tend to lean toward.

Q: Do you identify at all with Marcel Duchamp, and what do you think Duchamp would say of your work?

A: Duchamp never really inspired me.  I remember learning about his work at college art history courses, but was never drawn to them.  Duchamp made a statement about the art world and the work itself, creating works of art that wouldn’t seem like art at that time.  My work, more or less, contrasts two ways of life and how it dramatically changed over just a few hundred years.  I would think Duchamp would be drawn to my work because some would say I’m “defacing” the original portraits and the prominent people that helped create this country that we live in today.

Q: Out of curiousity, how much are the paintings in this series? Do you have a gallery?

A: No gallery, but I’m in the process of finding gallery representation.  My work goes from $1500 to $4000.

Q: You appear to be strongly influenced by ed ruscha, whom you’ve said is your favorite artist. How would you describe what makes you different, and not a variation on a theme?

A: Yes, Ed Ruscha is very influential on me.  I discovered his work in school and never turned back.  I wrote him a “fan letter” awhile back, not hoping to get anything in return, but a few weeks later, he sent me a postcard with one of his works on front and on the back with his signature.  But to top of the story, a few weeks from that day, I got a package with a return address of “Ruscha Studio.”  My heart started racing…he sent me his autographical book with a little note inside stating “Shawn, thanks for the kind letter.  Best Wishes, Ed Ruscha.”  Not many big time artists would do that for some rinky dink artist, but that gesture shows he’s a really a great guy…and not to mention his amazing work!  His text paintings are very apparent in my work, I think having that kind of bold text makes it easier to make whatever statement your making more clear.  Ed Ruscha’s gorgeous backgrounds mixed with the text have no (in most) apparent relationship, that’s the reason why they are so great…it’s almost so random and the juxtaposition of the two subjects makes the paintings work in some strange way.  For example, he’ll have the word HISTORY going behind a mountain scape.  Ruscha’s work also has a very west coast presence about it.  My work, however, I try to make a statement by contrasting the two words…the world of a “civil” society against the world of modern technology and its distractions.  I also like the fact that I’m recording the language used today in my work.  It dates my work, but it also makes the record of how our language is being cut down/abbreviated, etc. just like how the egyptians recorded their hieroglyphics and the early caveman recorded their language of using symbols and icons.

Q: What you see as a trend in art among working artists of your age/generation?

A: As I see a lot of artists working along different mediums rather the traditional mediums like oils, acrylics, canvas, etc.  I feel artists try very hard to find that one unique medium that makes their work theirs.  Art Work today also seems to have a more an anime/cartoon look, like urban or street art … along the lines of Shepard Fairey.  I like to retain the old traditions of painting, but add and combine popular culture lexicons to contrast the two.

Q: Do you see yourself moving in other directions, and if so, where?

A: I like the direction that I am currently moving in right now.  For once, I feel like I’m making a statement about my work that people can relate to, in contrast to my other work which may seem cool and technically well done, but didn’t really say anything.  There was no gusto behind it.  For example, my last series, The Paint Chips … I had a great time with those … they were fun, colorful, and able to retain my realistic, crisp quality of my work … but they didn’t really mean anything… I was merely trying to make a cool looking image … that’s it.  Although I still like the way they look and enjoyed working on them. I got dried up fast with them and felt constrained.  I feel like I was limited with what I could do with them.  My future work, is going to be along the same lines I’m (working in) now … I would like to do large scale diptychs and triptychs with more of a longer statement/facebook status/tweet. Overall, I’m a very pleased with how the series is turning out, the statements that it says, the comical tone of some, and plan on continuing contrasting the two worlds in some way or another.

Q: Do you plan on staying in Connecticut, or will you be moving to NY anytime soon?

A: Connecticut definitely is not my first choice of which state to live in.  My partner and I have discussed moving out west for a few years just to experience something completely different and get away from the fast paced east coast. San Fran or Portland.  I feel further down the road settling down in New England, but have no plans to be in the Big City.  I’m perfectly happy with being only 1.5 hrs from the city…. easily accessible, but far enough from the congestion.

……………………………………………………..

View larger photos from the gallery please enter the FS button.

……………………………………………………..

Graffiti is illegal in Belgium. That's too bad.

Dehors! L’histoire des graffiti à Bruxelles

By Sara Marilungo

Neerpede Park is a huge open air art gallery. Little known by the people of Brussels and surely not included in any tour guide or do-it-yourself journey in Belgium,  it lies on the outskirts of Brussels, Eddie Mercks metro stop.

The pillars of the three flyovers that cross the park have become the favourite spot of Brussels’ graffiti artists to show dozens and dozens of works of street art.

“Neerpede Park is one of those places that I call ‘no-man’s land’,” says Adrien Grimmeau, art historian and professor at Iselp, a contemporary art centre in Brussels. “Brussels’ graffiti artists moved away from  the streets of the city centre, where there is less control by the police and they can make works that sometimes require up to 10 hours, sometimes even two days”.

Artist at work: Defying da law

Grimmeau has recently written the first book ever about street art in Brussels. The book, titled Dehors! L’histoire des graffiti à Bruxelles and published by CFC-editions, will be released on the 15th of June on the occasion of the exhibition Explosition. L’art des graffiti a Bruxelles – a title in between the French “explosion” and “exposition” – at the Musée d’Ixelles of Brussels.

“I chose this title for the book for two main reasons: first of all “Dehors!” – get out! – is what the teachers say to the kids who misbehave in class. Graffiti art is made by young people, often children who were considered “rebel” at school. Secondly, I say “Dehors!” to the readers of the book, but also to the artists and to myself. Enough with the museums, go look for art in the streets!,” says Grimmeau.

The exhibition will show pictures, sculptures, paintings and installations made by almost 20 artists with a street art background. It aims to show how the artists who exhibit in the museums sometimes come from a background which is anything but academic.

The book tells the history and evolution of graffiti art in Brussels from its origins in the ‘80s until now. “It is a way to speak about Brussels, its youths and its street art,” says Grimmeau, who collected interviews with some of the most famous graffiti artists of Brussels’ milieu, namely Bonom, Muga, Obes, Na and Defo, five artists who differ in terms of topics, typology of art forms and techniques.

“During the ‘80s graffiti was a more social and political art. Afterwards, in the ‘90s, hip hop became an out-and-out underground cultural movement linked to music, rap and break-dance. Differently form today, the graffiti of the ‘80s and the ‘90s were mainly made of letters and few images in poor and degraded areas of the city,” says Grimmeau. These graffiti were also often inspired to comics, of which Belgium boasts a rich tradition. However, Grimmeau explains that the graffiti artists of the ‘80s mainly drew their inspiration from American comics, in particular Vaughn Bode. “It was more ‘cool’”, explains Grimmeau with a smile. “I know for sure that graffiti artist read comics, but it is not ‘cool’ to paint The Smurfs – Les Schtroumpfs – on the walls.”

“Now it is different. The artists want to show a different way to look at the city and take it back. They don’t want to change the world, maybe they want to make us smile or surprise us. They want to tell the people to look around themselves. “

Not only spray then, but stencils, fonts, stickers, images, tags and out-and-out paintings.

Grimmeau calls them neo-graffiti, in order to highlight these artists’ will to increase the interaction with the city and with the spot itself where the painting is realized.

“Graffiti are more site-specific, which is also what happens now with works of contemporary art in the museums.” For instance, in the case of Bonom, there is always a reason for the animal painted on a certain building. Grimmeau mentions the example of the fox falling on the wall of a building in Place du Congrès. At the feet of the Colonne du Congrès et de la Constitution there is a flame – the flame of the Unknown Soldier –,  which blazes endlessly. Looking carefully, the orange fox looks like a flame pointing at the sky. “Nowadays, in most cases graffiti artists are not inexperienced people, but they come from art schools and they want to bring art out of the museums and the schools, in the streets.”

Grimmeau notices that in the recent past Brussels’ authorities, as often as not, built  “architectural monstrosity” ; in one occasion they even destroyed an art nouveau building by the architect Victor Horta. “Graffiti artists don’t paint on the walls because they hate the city, but in order to make it better and more beautiful. It is also a way to claim the public space as a social space.”

For instance, Obes believes that the city belongs to everybody and that everybody is allowed to express him or herself creatively. But if the city belongs to everybody, then someone may not agree with the graffiti. “As a matter of fact, it is difficult to come to an agreement. Here in Belgium we are very good at making laws and regulations that don’t please anyone, precisely because they’re aimed at pleasing everybody.”

Graffiti in Belgium are illegal and, differently from other cities in the world, there are no walls legally used for street art display of graffiti. For this reason, most of the graffiti artists interviewed for the book had problems with the law on several occasions. For example, Defo and Obes went to prison for some days. The artists are often required to repay substantial amounts of money for damages.

Bonom is the most famous graffiti artist in Brussels. He painted some beautiful graffiti of animals and dinosaurs, even if half of them have been removed. However, not even Bonom is protected and he often had problems with the law, according to Grimmeau.

“The whole graffiti process is contradictory because sometimes these artists are summoned by the authorities to paint public places, such as the tram station  De Wand,” says Grimmeau.

Supports for the arts ...

Beside Neerpede Park , there are other “concentrations” of graffiti in the vicinity of the cultural centre Recyclart, nearby Gare du Midi o in Le Marolles, an historic neighbourhood in Brussels where, since the ’60s, artists have been meeting to make art and discuss about the problems of the city. “It is the soul of Brussels,” says Grimmeau. However, most graffiti are made along the metro lines, such as the line from Gare du Midi to Gare Central or between the station Pennenhius and Bockstael, in the neighbourhood Laeken.

Near the metro stop  Porte de Namur, Bonom painted several buffalos that create the illusion, for the people observing from the metro, that the animals are running. “There are at least 20 buffalos. Even before he discovered Blu’s animations, Bonom revolutionized the way of looking at graffiti in the metro lines of Brussels: once the graffiti were painted on the trains and moved with the trains, now the trains move and the motionless graffiti come to life.” A similar dinosaur was painted by Bonom near Etterbeek Station.

In collaboration with Iselp, Grimmeau also organizes  “graffiti walking tours” for organized groups of several people. You just need to contact Iselp to make arrangements.

…………………………………………………………………….

…………………………………………………………………….

About the writer:

Sara Marilungo has an MA in journalism from Independent Colleges of Dublin. She is a freelance writer in Dublin, but temporarily resides near Brussels. Her work has appeared in the Italian webzine www.nuok.it, and occasionally for other websites and newspapers. She also received a degree in Italy in Communication Science with a thesis about contemporary art and philosophy of languages. This article appeared in the online magazine www.nuok.it, in Italian. This is its first publication in English.

For more information:  http://saramarilungo.eu5.org/

© 2011 Herb Moore

“Draw until your hand feels numb…”

An Interview with Herb Moore

by Mike Foldes

The following interview with cartoonist Herb Moore was conducted via e-mail exchange in April 2011.

Q: When I look at your drawings on your web site, it seems like I’ve seen these somewhere before. How long have you been at this, and where does your work typically appear?

Herb Moore: I was a doodler in school but it was more to escape listening to the teacher than for a love of drawing, ha, ha.

Herb Moore's self-portrait.

Mike, I’ve been in this business for twenty years and have worked at almost every major studio in Hollywood, with the exception of Dreamworks and Sony, but I’ve pitched project ideas to both.  I’ve spent most of my time working at Warner Bros. and so maybe some of their style rubbed off on me, ha, ha.  I was always a fan of the Warner Bros. cartoons when I was a kid because the characters seemed to have some bite to them.  They developed some great characters and character duos.  Now I’m working on Phineas & Ferb, during the day, and it has to be one of the best productions that I’ve ever been on both because of the staff and the show itself. Finally, my website has been an opportunity to showcase some of my personal work as well as a place to host any new content that I create.  I’m soon to release a new animated short titled, “Duffy McTaggart and the 19th Hole” and I’m co-developing several mobisode series of animations for a client outside of the United States.  I’m very proud of animationsoup.net and I look forward to creating even more content to showcase at my website.

Q: Where did you study animation techniques, or did you have on-the-job training?

HM: I passionately studied animation on my own as I obtained my Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.  I knew that I needed to draw as much as possible, and really had no solid guidance as to what I “should” do exactly, but I wasn’t going to be stopped.  Once I got my foot in the door at my first “industry” job, that’s when finding work became a little bit easier.  I actually learned more on the job than I possibly could have been taught in school.  I’ll admit, an education in an animation program would have helped, but really, once I got my foot in the door, and I demonstrated my desire to work hard and learn, I did fine, (and will continue to).

Q: In becoming a cartoonist, did you distinguish between what apparently came naturally to you and the classical concepts of ‘fine art’? In your mind, what’s the distinction?

HM: That’s a heavy question for a lite mind like mine, ha, ha.  As I studied “fine art” in college, I initially knew I needed to draw as much as possible and fine art allowed that, but what I gained was an appreciation for true art and what it takes to create it.  I knew that I could tell an entertaining story, as well as act funny, and I felt that I could back that up with great drawings “eventually,” as I worked at drawing, but I had no appreciation for what it actually took to create through art.  Fine art to me is the ability to create something artistically that can be appreciated in one way or another, that is unique, born out of it’s creators experiences, feelings, imagination, and is one’s own personal expression.  Wow, that’s good stuff, I have to write that down.

……………………………………

……………………………………

Q: I take it you’ve worked with quite a number of other cartoonists over the years. Who do you recall as being most memorable, or fun to work with?

HM: When I worked at Warner Bros. several years ago, I worked with Bob Doucette who was probably one of the most enjoyable artists for me to work ever with because he was so pleasant, as well as extremely talented.  I learned so much from him and had a great time.  Currently, Rob Hughes at Disney is the most fun because he knows funny, he knows how to make people laugh with his artwork, as well as his writing.  I have never laughed so hard as when I’m working with Rob.  I have been extremely blessed to have worked with some very talented and enjoyable people who have eventually turned into great friends.

Q: What do you think of the “Beavis and Butthead” or “South Park” programs? Anime? Any favorite styles?

HM: I love animation, unless it’s totally crap and I just don’t watch crap.  Shows like “Beavis and Butthead”, as well as “South Park”, are great shows.  I was so happy when “South Park” won an Emmy a few years ago.  It’s hard for me to say I have a favorite style, but I will say this, I love independent animation productions both feature films and short form.  Some of the most creative and well thought out animation seems to come from independent productions.

Q: Herb, I imagine both hardware and software have changed a lot since you started out, and there is the fear technology is taking over for pushing pencils and papers (people). How has the business changed technically since you started out and is how is demand these days for good cartoonists? Where is that demand coming from (if it is)?

HM: Things have definitely changed but technology is simply allowing us to do more things faster.  Yes, you have to know more than just how to draw but the possiblities in animation are broader today than ever before.  Personally, I believe “demand” for talented artists and animators is quite healthy these days, in most if not all areas of animation.  And, you don’t have to live in Los Angeles or New York, etc., to be consistently busy within this industry.  The internet has obviously open up a lot of opportunities for animators and I only see that increasing.  Also, animation in the games business is growing rapidly, all due to the blossoming of the digital age.

Q: What computer programs do you find most helpful to produce your cartoons?

HM: I use Sketchbook Pro for creating and developing ideas, such as backgrounds and characters, and then I do my animations in Adobe Flash.  I often use Photoshop in creating or touching up artwork for my website or for presentation.  I’ll also use Adobe Premiere to assemble my animatics as well as my final output of my latest animted short film.

Q: Any tips for the aspiring cartoonist?

HM: Well, yes.  Not only do you need to draw until your hand feels numb every waking hour of the day, and you must continue to study great shows, films and great stories, but you have to be technologically prepared for drawing on digital tablets, like the various Wacom tablets, and you have to know a variety of software, and then be able to manipulate your images in different ways.  Younger people have such a great opportunity to impact the world through their creations because we’re linked together now more than ever, so be prepared.

Visit Moore’s web site at: http://www.animationsoup.net

©2010 Karen Gunderson

Ramadan, 2010 | oil on canvas | 52 1/4 ” x 61 1/2 “

“All Black: Paintings That Have To Do

With How The Light Works”

An interview with Karen Gunderson

by Mike Foldes

The following interview took place by e-mail exchanges from September 2010 thru April 2011, during which time Gunderson had shows in Santa Fe and Bahrain …

Q: Karen, let’s start with the basics? Can you tell us where you’re from and what life was like growing up there?

Karen Gunderson: I was raised in Racine, Wisconsin.  My father was a World War II veteran/hero and damaged by it.  He earned the Silver Star, Bronze Star, Croix de Guerre and citations from all over Europe.  He was in the Battle of the Bulge and was one of 20 men to come back from a company of 200.  I guess he had a reason to drink.  He was brilliant mechanically.  My mother was kind of high strung.  A really hard worker, very smart and she wanted to be loved and have fun and be appreciated.  My dad was very stoic and my mom very verbal.  I work hard like my mom, but I think I am more stoic like my dad.  I was an only child, so my friends became my family.  In fact, I am still very close to a number of my childhood friends.

We moved when I was seven to Blaine Avenue and had some girlfriends as well as boyfriends and a front yard and a back yard.

Q: What are the first things you remember that gave you the impetus to make art? What visual experience? Or, was it the first set of watercolors your parents got you when you were 5?

KG: I think I was around 10 or 12 when I had a heightened perceptual experience that probably made me the artist I am today.  My parents had been fighting and I felt out of control… or as I perceived it… crazy.  So I went outside and thought what would a crazy person do?  I proceeded to touch the ground, the grey cement.  I brushed my hand across the top of the grass.  I traced the lid of the garbage lid.  I took the branches and leaves of the weeping willow tree in the back in both my hands and moved with them, back and forth, then I touched the begonia petals on the plants on the north side of the house.  All this and more happened while walking around the house many times.  On the last trip, I knelt on the grass in the front and peered under the bushes that were up against the house.  The dirt was black and crystal like.  There was a leaf of clover and then suddenly a shiny black ant climbed up the stalk and across the green petal.  The ant was so big.  Then I turned, holding the ant in my mind and imagined him on the huge maple tree near the street.  The scale shift was visceral and intense, as was the experience of getting up from the ground and being aware how everything changed each time I got higher or moved my head.  Each change was a different perspective.   I never told anyone until a few years ago about that day of experiences.  I kept it a secret, but I knew then that it had made me become different or maybe I was already different to have experienced it.

Q: OK, so what was it like being a “different” kid in the neighborhood? Were you a closet artist? Did you start drawing or painting right away, or was it evolutionary…. Jr. high, high school, college? Were your first subjects some of the things you saw during this epiphany?

KG: Actually, I wasn’t a “different” kid.  That’s the thing.  It was my secret.  I rode bikes, wrestled with the boys, played with my girl friends… all quite normal. I became a public person… one that was about being popular, and involved with school and cheerleading and later the local theatre guild, and stuff that was involved with achieving and being social and making my father and mother proud of me.  I kind of knew that that was what I could give them, because the part of me that was different I couldn’t give to them.  And all along, when I went to the feeling place of the loneliness of an only child I had my secret.  And also secretly and a part of that place, I was very shy.

The art started in high school a bit.  And I went to Wustum Art Museum summer classes on the lawn to learn to draw.  There was a good instructor whose name escapes me.  I think that is where my confidence to be able to draw started. But my friends Linda Winchester and Joe Wilfer were the artists in high school.  I was more involved with the public stuff.    Images with changing perspectives which were part of my epiphany didn’t come into being in my work until Graduate School.

Q: Was anyone in your  family involved with art?

KG: My Grandpa Gunderson whose father came from Norway was a housepainter in Wisconsin.  I remember his hands were hard and gnarled and I learned later that they were totally arthritic due to working in the cold a lot of the time.  As a hobby, he used to paint furniture in the “Norwegian marbleizing” style.  I never realized he was marbleizing until I went to Norway and saw the same painting on pillars in churches and walls.  Apparently the Norwegians had no marble, so they made their own!  When he retired, he took all his old leftover paint from the houses and began painting on pieces of cardboard.  He used a lot of invention in the way he paint the images of trees or mountains or sky and when he wanted to put something in that his arthritic hands couldn’t do, he would cut something out of a magazine and paste it on the painting and then kind of paint on it a bit to integrate it.  I have two of them and they are prized possessions to me.

Q: Where did you study?

KG: College, I went to Wisconsin State University, Whitewater… a very small school at the time. I was majoring in Elementary Education.  I think I got a D in piano and got the sophomore blues, so I quit in the middle of my sophomore year.  My English teacher Ben Collins told me that I was too smart for Whitewater and should be in a better school like Santa Barbara.  I got a job at Johnson’s Wax and worked in the Frank Lloyd Wright building’s great workroom.  It was wonderful being in the space of that building.  The spaces alone were constantly changing, as were the vantage points from every step.  I had intended to save money and go to a great school, but soon I got involved with the local Theatre Guild again and kind of blew everything on clothes and eating out in restaurants. But I hated working 9 to 5 and so I decided to go back to Whitewater and I was determined to get a great education there if I had to pull it out of the teachers.  I never got below a B from then on.   I took a drawing class which was required for my major and one day, Tom Parker and Francis Coelho and John Stevenson stopped me in the hall and said they had seen my drawings and that I should major in art.  What they said connected for me and I called my mother to ask her if I could change majors and she said yes if I would still get a degree to teach because she didn’t want me to be a starving artist. Considering my family background, I would need a job.  Also, being an artist meant that I was going to do something that was not an approved or normal profession for someone from my family.  By becoming an artist I was cutting a big part of myself off from my family. They were always supportive of me as a person, but I think they thought I was becoming a stranger to them by being an artist…something that they didn’t know about.

I went to Graduate School at the University of Iowa. I received a MA in Painting, followed by an MFA in Intermedia.  I believe it was the first degree of Intermedia in the United States.

Q: Who were your most influential teachers?

KG: Clayton Bailey, Tom Parker, John Stevenson, Francis Coelho and Ben Collins were my most influential teachers during college. And then there were Stuart Edie and Hans Breder during graduate school.

The students in the art department were very industrious.  We would be in the studios painting or drawing or doing sculpture or clay or prints or art history beginning at 8 am and working until about 10 every night.  Following our intense day, we would all go out drinking and playing pool at the local downtown dive.  We were a fortunate group.  Twenty-one of us graduated in art and art education and eleven of us got assistantships to graduate schools.  Something clicked in me during that time about making art.  My art was something I could be in charge of… not necessarily control because I was still learning that. And it was the first time my secret way of looking at the world could live in my everyday world that included other people.  It also increased my secret shyness and made me more afraid because what I was doing meant so much to me and I was suddenly vulnerable to the world’s view of something that was all mine.

Q: What are your earliest memories of making art, or wanting to be an artist?

KG: I remember drawing a fish when I was about 4 that I was delighted with and my mother loved.

Q: When did you know this is what you would be doing for the rest of your life?

KG: I had conflicting feelings when I was in college.  On the one hand, I wanted to learn to be a Montessori schoolteacher and take the knowledge to someplace poor and teach the children like Maria Montessori had.  On the other hand, I wanted to be an artist, which wasn’t all that respected in my family.  After all it didn’t put a roof over anyone’s head, but being an artist won out.   Especially because I got an assistantship at the University of Iowa and I knew I could teach college somewhere and do my art.

Those days you could get a job.

Q: When we met in the late ’60s, you were teaching art at The Ohio State University. How did the environment there differ from what you had at Iowa?

KG: I went to graduate school at the University of Iowa, in Iowa City and the environment is one of calm and patience. Very different than Wisconsin and very different from Ohio State.  Upon graduating with an MA in Painting… working with Stuart Edie and an MFA in Intermedia… working with Hans Breder, I went up the road to teach at Cornell College.  I was 25 years old, had really long hair, drove a 1964 356C red Porsche and my boyfriend’s 350cc Yamaha motorcycle. I wore mini skirts and over-the-knee yellow vinyl boots. I also had had a 90cc Honda for all of graduate school that I drove in all kinds of weather.

I was very welcomed into the Art Department, but until I actually had conversations with other faculty members, I was clearly left out of the community.  After I got to know people, I got included more.  But although it was a nourishing environment, I was definitely on my own again.  The good thing was that everyone in the art department, including students, was excited about what they were doing, but it still had that feeling of calm and patience.

Ohio State was very different.  I met some great people there including you and Cheri and Larry Camp, but the feeling in the Art Department was more impersonal.  That might have been because it was so big.  There were forty men and me and another woman who I think taught weaving part time.  I got patted on the top of my head or my tusch almost every day.  I don’t think they took me very seriously and there was a real passive aggressive streak there.

Q: You had a long working relationship with Sol Lewitt. How did that influence the way you approach your art and the style that you have?

KG: One really great thing that happened when I taught at Ohio State was that I met and became close to Sol Lewitt.  He had come out to do a wall drawing… a real beauty.  His influence on my art has been great.  When I hold him in my consciousness, he demands that everything about the piece is in the piece. I eliminate anything that doesn’t get to the point.  Maybe that is the most important thing I have said in this whole interview.  His personal integrity to focus on the art and not get caught up in the exclusivity of the art world is also really important to me.  I really admire and care for his widow Carol and their two daughters Eva and Sophia.  What they are doing with his estate is important and it feels like they are doing things the way he would want them to be done.

Q: I loved the cloud paintings and cloud pieces you were doing at the time. How did these come about?

KG: The clouds all began in Iowa.  They were a new experience in a way.  The clouds in Wisconsin change very fast.  A whole weather system can change in about ten minutes…very dangerous for those sailing on Lake Michigan.  When I was in graduate school in Iowa, the same clouds would hang around for days.  And you could see the weather coming a week ahead of time.

Again, there was a sense calm and patience… and looking up, which came to mean hope.

Q: You seemed at the time to have a great interest in poetry and literature. Are you still a ‘fan’?

KG: I used to go to poetry readings all the time at Iowa.  The poetry workshopbrought some amazing poets.  I still love to go to poetry readings and to read poetry. Besides your poetry from so many years ago, which I have saved, I feel connected to a number of poets…that I read all the time.  I really respect and admire John Yau, Hanford Yang, Gerrit Henry, Tod Thilleman, John Ashberry, Mark Daniel Cohen and Donald Kuspit.  Mark is writing my catalog essay for the exhibition. So much gets said in less words and it is so much more than that. For me, poetry is a distillation of experience or thought and a relationship with the sound of the words.  It is actually more than I can say. So yes, I am still a ‘fan’.

Q: You moved to New York in the early ‘70s. How did that affect your work?

KG: When I moved to New York in 1973, I had to start using acrylic paint because I was living in a loft that I shared with my graduate school friend, Suzanne McConnell, and my studio opened up to the platform I had constructed for my bed.  I invented a way to paint with sponges and kind of drawing the paint on by squeezing the sponge.  I was continuing the cloud series and including images in the clouds.

Q: Your circle of friends and business associates in the art world?

KG: I kept my old friends from Ohio and Iowa and Wisconsin… in fact they happily used the opportunity of my living in New York City to visit the City.  But before I moved to New York, I went there and met Mark Richard and Lucy Feller who were introduced to me by Steve Fox from Iowa.  The Fellers were wonderful people and they liked my art and to help me, they had a brunch for their collector friends where they introduced me and my work. I had come back, bringing a number of pieces… one to replace theirs which they had purchased and had been broken in transit.  Among the collectors was Paul Schupf.  I still count Paul as one of my best friends.  We had the same eye for art and similar principles and I can to this day, trust Paul to be honest and to care. I met lots of famous people through Paul…Leo Castelli, Irving Blum, Henry Geldzahler, Alex & Ada Katz, to name a few.  I remember one evening that Paul took me to dinner and we were with some lovely people from the Tisch family and it was really interesting and I was talking so much that I didn’t eat much.  They insisted I take home my dinner along with some extra cookies, all of which I am sure cost more than my rent for the month. I always felt the need to touch base with my own reality, so after that magnificent evening, I went to Magoo’s where I saw my friend, Julian Weissman.  I asked him if he liked leftovers and he said yes.  I didn’t at the time, so I gave him mine and he walked me half way home.  We’ve been married now for 31 years, and have a great son, David Weissman.

Q: What do you regard as your ‘big break’ as a working artist?

KG: In terms of importance, first there is Julian and also David. Without his support, and David’s understanding and care, I wouldn’t have been able to do what I have done. Julian has helped me at every crossroad and been my spiritual as well as physical support throughout our life together. Let’s just assume that Julian permeates everything…as does David.  Chronologically, the first break was the opportunity to come to New York City with a job.  I taught a class called Perception with a composer and a dancer, (I was the visual part) at NYU School of the Arts for three years.  The knowledge was amazing, as were the students.  The students were actors, dancers and cinematographers and they were brilliant.  It allowed me to move to New York and get a loft and also gave me the time to paint.  Break #2, I had my first one person show at Gloria Cortella in the Fuller Building.  It got reviewed in Art News by poet/critic Gerrit Henry and Margaret Pomfret in Arts.

But when I met Elaine deKooning through Julian, Break #3 and she suggested me to Aladar Marberger at Fischbach Gallery, that really began things. Lots of reviews and lots of sales and the experience with Alidar was great.  He really believed and promoted his artists.

A lot of times my big breaks are meeting and just knowing people.  They are supportive guides in a way.  From being in the Florence Biennale and winning second prize in painting, I got to know the amazing scholar and writer John Spike and his also amazing wife/writer Michele. Meeting and knowing Jonathan Silver and his wife Barbara, Michael Brenson and Sharon O’Connell, Kocot and Hatton, Lars and Bente Strandh, James Young and Lisa Ades, Sanford Hirsch and Debbie Beblo, Ellen and Sam Newhouse… these are all important people to me.  I look to them for their example of hard work, talents and invincible spirits.

Q: What’s it like to be an artist, a mom, a wife and a businesswoman?

KG: Being an artist is my addiction to life.  If I can’t paint, I get cranky.  On the other hand, being a Mom gives me some perspective on life.  It is something even more important than my art.  Not that I would ever stop making art, but the day to day of being David’s Mom takes precedence over the art.  As a wife, Julian’s  and my careers are not the same, but related and so it is not exactly easy, but understandable.  In years past when Julian was running public art galleries, we had dinner parties for the artists.  It was fun because I learned to cook and I loved the artists he showed.  To answer your question about being a businesswoman… I am not a good businesswoman.  I think I have a problem with that because it involves dealing with the world outside of my art.  I love sending emails to friends when I have a show or something coming up, but I don’t think about promotion as in “careerism” because it doesn’t feel right.

Q: Do you think women have a tougher time than men these days making it in the art world?

KG: As always, I think the toughest part of being a woman today has to do with money.  (Maybe it is true for men too.)  When someone has some success, there is a competitive feeling that comes out in a lot of people.  People can get mean.  Also, there is still the reality that people feel women shouldn’t get paid as much as men.  I personally love it when rich women stand tough
and make people pay top price for their work.  That makes them even richer and more powerful.  That will in turn make it easier for the rest of us in the future.

Q: Who in the contemporary art world have been your strongest influences?

KG: Sol Lewitt, David Hockney, Grace Hartigan are the most contemporary influences.  You didn’t ask what art I liked.  Actually, I like the work of a lot of living artists…G.H. Hovagimyan, Meg Abbott, Kocot & Hatton, Lars Strandh, Deborah Kass, William Beckman, William Richards, Hans Breder, Brenda Zlamany, Robert Mangold, Yvonne Jacquet, Robert Gober, Clayton Bailey, Tom Parker, Donald Sultan, Cindy Sherman, Alex Katz, Eric Fischl, April Gornik, John Torreano, Vija Celmins, Tim Hawkinson, Scott Daniel Ellison, Frank Stella, Odd Nerdrum, Mark Tansey, Jess, Janet Passehl, Fredericka Foster, Jack Ox, Daisy Craddock, Catherine Behrant, Dennis Farber, Jaroslaw Flicinski, Gary Kuehn, John Walker, Susan Ebersole, Michael and Carol Venezia, Kim Keever, Maciej Swieszewski, Andy Goldsworthy, Becca Smith, Michael Torlen, John Walker, Alex Frances, Paul Zelevansky, Nancy Hagin, Mary Miss, Barnaby Furnas, Ana Mendiata, Linda Benglis, Omar Rashid, Rahim Sharif, Esther Senor/Carmen Cifrian, Kareem Al Bosta, Rocio Garriga Hinare,  Ali Al Mahmeed, Samia Engineer, Balquees Falkro… those are artists I like and admire… for influences other than contemporary, Jonathan Silver was really important to my painting, and I really liked Jack Smith, and then we have to go to Art History including Chinese Northern and Southern T’Sung paintings of landscapes…especially the vertical mountains.

Q: I understand you recently moved your studio into a portion of your loft. Will your paintings get smaller?

KG: I doubt it.

Q: How do you work? At night? With music?

KG: Being a mother, I learned early on that I can work at any time.

These days it is preferable in the morning because I am more rested.

I put on old movies while I paint.  Since I have seen them all, I don’t have to watch them.  I can imagine what is happening on one of the sides of my brain and that becomes kind of a white noise and on the other side of my brain I can look at what I am doing and think about that.  Also, if I get interrupted, I can stop the movie, then when I go back, I am in the same place, so to speak.

Q: What is the evolution of your ‘black’ paintings? Do they come from a dark space inside, or are you simply exploring another way to manipulate light?

KG: They began as underpaintings of my last show of cloud paintings with Fischbach Gallery in 1988.  Three things were going on.  One, my dealer Alidar Marberger was dying of AIDS and I wanted to do something great for him.  So I made the entire gallery a sunset with a cloudless painting with varying shades of blue to the gold magic time of the day on one side and the far end an almost all black painting of clouds that were overpainted with cerise red.   All the paintings had secondary images in them, and most of them were presented in different ways.  Some went into corners, some went around corners and one went onto the ceiling. These are installation shots of the exhibition.( http://www.karengunderson.com/fischbach.htm )

The other thing is, I needed to change the way I was painting the clouds… invent a new way to show the light and the forms, so I painted the cloud forms with black paint, let the paint dry and then painted against the grain of the brushmarks with color.  That takes us to the third thing.  I had quit drinking.  I found I had a lot of energy and I was not afraid of my dark side anymore.  Before I had painted my cloud paintings almost as a way to escape… to leave earth behind.  Now I was feeling grounded and connected to the paint and the painting in a new way.

After the show, with Aladar’s permission, I left the gallery.  He hadn’t been there for at least three years and he said he was never going back because he was collecting disability.  He was my champion, so without him there, I didn’t feel like I belonged.  I continued to work with the images of kind of cloud-like forms in black and then painting color over the strokes as in the exhibition at Fischbach.  Then one day I painted an all black painting and left it that way.  My great collector Blaine Roberts saw it and wanted it, so it left my studio.  I went back to the black and color and then a couple months later, I had two paintings of entirely black paintings in my studio, drying, waiting for me to paint on them and my friend Jonathan Silver came over.  He said, “Leave those paintings alone.  Just give them a couple of weeks Karen.”  I always trusted Jonathan and that was the true beginning of the black paintings.  It isn’t just manipulating light.  It is a different way to paint images.  Black paint has always been used abstractly.  Using black paint to paint the images and using the light to show the forms becomes an experience.  It includes the viewer, the body of the viewer and the movement of the body of the viewer.  I want my painting to be an experience… a physical experience as well as an emotional and intellectual one.  The paintings change as the viewer moves up/down or right/left.  The images I choose have to do with how the light works.  With the images of water, we see the light reflected off the surface of the water.  It is the same thing with my paintings, we see the water because of the light reflected off the surface of the painting.

Churning Sea, 2006 | Oil on linen | 60" x 60"

And the experience of water is that it is always moving and as the viewer is always moving it reinforces that experience.  The moon painting changes just a little from left to right… only to show us the volume of the moon, but the most important thing about the moon is that it is glowing and that you can see craters and shadows and it connects with all the myths of the moon — for me, anyway.

Murphy's Moon, 2010 | Oil on linen | 60" x 60"

The landscape paintings to date are of the mountains seen from Tibet.  I have never been there, but I think Tibet is really fascinating and important and I want people to hold it in their minds to protect it from destruction.  Because the paintings are monochrome, it helps us to focus on the varying forms and shapes and spaces… which change as we pass by them.

Everest from Kala Patar, 2005 | 52 1/4" x 61 1/2"

The constellations are my way of fighting cynicism.  There is always the negative in the news.  I guess it is the nature of news.  I personally think people like the adrenalin rush that one gets from fear.  I probably do too because I like action films, but for things that last… like Art, I want to remind people of events that I think are revolutionarily positive, like when the Berlin Wall came down, or the passage of the Abolition of Slavery.  The constellation paintings are harder to see because they need absolutely perfect light to be seen to the full effect.  By painting exact days and locations of the constellations, I also want to remind us that things happen at different moments everywhere and what we do individually and collectively is important and also to try to pay attention to what is happening… or will happen… in the case of Apophis Near Miss.

Apophis Near Miss, 2009 | Oil on Linen| 61 1/2" x 156 3/4" | Triptych

The Portraits are reminders of powerful people who each accomplished things in the world for their countries.  In those paintings, black is a metaphor for history and the people are stepping into the light for including them in our lives today.

Q: What advice would you give a young person about becoming a working artist in this political and economic climate?

KG: Well Mike, I would tell a young person or anyone who is becoming an artist that they should first figure out how they are going to make a living other than from their art…they say on Broadway “Keep your day job” which holds true for artists as well.  Then I would tell them to make art that is relevant to themselves and/or their time…no matter what anyone else says.  I have always believed artists are shamen.  Their art in the world is like pebbles thrown into a pond and they have ripple effects.  So they also need to take  responsibility for the importance of what they make.  I would love it if people would look at the world and think of what would make it better and then make that thing that helps or heals or just makes people think.  I would tell them to locate themselves in a place w here they feel comfortable to live their lives, and a place where they will push themselves to struggle in the context of their art.  I would tell them to socialize with people and friends who are interested in their art and who they are interested in.  One good reason to go to Graduate School is to meet a community of friends that they will bond with for the rest of their lives.  I would suggest that if they are fortunate enough to exhibit in a good gallery in NYC, they should trust their dealer to price and promote their work…but to keep a good eye on it and to help wherever it is appropriate.  And finally, I would tell this same person to feel really lucky because they get to get up each day and see the world from their special, perceptual, intelligent and sensitive eyes.  They get to live that day looking at the world from their unique experience of themselves…it’s a great way to live.

……………………………………………………..

View larger photos from the gallery please enter the FS button.

……………………………………………………..

To see more paintings , visit Gunderson’s web site at:

Gunderson’s work is represented by ClampArt in New York City, New York; William Siegal Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico; and, Frost & Reed, London, England.

“Karen Gunderson: Constellations, Moons, and Water”
May 5 – June 11, 2011
Opening reception:
Thursday, May 5, 2011
6.00 – 8.00 p.m.
__________________________

For more information contact:

ClampArt
www.clampart.com

521-531 West 25th Street
Ground Floor
New York City 10001
646.230.0020 T
646.230.8008 F
Gallery hours:
Tuesday – Saturday,
11:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.

“We are all Khaled Said.”

Think graffiti under fire!

By Hala Salah Eldin Hussein

Albawtaka Review editor

(This article appeared in somewhat different form in Alahram weekly newspaper.)

You don’t come across such eloquent voices of objection every day, not in Egypt anyway. It was the celebration day: February 11, 2011, former vice president Omar Suleiman announced that Hosni Mubarak was to step down from office. Crowds had flocked to Tahrir square, already crammed full of people, to rejoice in their victory.

Egypt, you are my special mother.

“Egypt, you are my splendid mother.”

Trying to push my way through throngs of people in jubilant mood in the Square, or rather, swept along with the crowds till I reached the nearest exit on Sheik Rehan St. – you don’t choose where you are heading with a multitude of one million souls in one place – I was struck by these brilliant graffiti, probably woven within earshot of bullets or among tear gas, by unknown citizens.

In random blurry lines, or in brightly professional ones, these artists – probably talented young people who never scribbled graffiti before – have woven paintings that they must have known municipality workers will probably paint away. In fact, they could not even have known for sure whether their demands — now glaring with articulated statements on the wall, screaming to topple the corrupt regime and introduce political liberties and social justice — would be met.

No doubt some of these young artists have been met with beating, massive arrests, and killings. Yet they continued to paint within a short distance of the Ministry of the Interior building. Future retribution was possible, which might explain lack of signatures, whereas several names accompanied those on a wall in Mohamed Mahmoud St. bringing out Egyptians’ joy of freedom in all its splendor.

This is what happened on 25.

One graffito remembered Khaled Said, a young man killed by brutal policemen in June 2010, in Alexandria. You could tell that graffitists are internet users, engrossed in the Facebook revolution and social-networking sites since the words “We are all Khaled Said” written in one part of the wall is actually a Facebook group demanding legal action against those guilty of killing the young man. However rural backgrounds can be detected. Rudimentary scenes from the Egyptian country are lucid, too, pigeons, verdancy, country walls, footprints, in all colors, illuminating part of the wall. It’s uncertain when these drawings took place. They must have been drawn in stages, from the first sparkle of protests till the triumph, “He is down,” says one graffito. Another graffito would mark a new post-revolutionary change in Egyptian behavior, “From now on this is YOUR country,” it said. “Don’t throw garbage in the street. Don’t give bribes. Don’t forge documents. Don’t submit to injustice or tyranny. Make a complaint against any service that fails to fulfill its duties.”

One can only imagine how difficult it must have been to smuggle paints and brushes into this turmoil of unprecedented demonstrations. These markings — initials, slogans, and drawings, written, spray-painted, or sketched — are evidence of the artistic spirit of the revolution. Somehow amidst all the clamor and bloodshed, young artists came armed with their brushes and paints, pallid colors and shiny ones, to light up the wall with pride and determination, “Revolution till victory,” one design read, and another, “Hold your head high, you are an Egyptian.” Some designs glorified a particular day, “This is what happened on 25″ while others portrayed scenes reminiscent of rural origins. They have expressed gratitude, “Glory to martyrs”; rage, “Leave, NOW” and its future outgrowth, “Seeking revenge for martyrs”; joy, and the longing of joy.

Your love is freedom.

These graffiti, in political perception, were much like statements proclaimed by the leaders of non-violent protest movements. They were mature, vigilant, and passionate, street art forever shedding light upon political spontaneity and patriotism, as in the words, “25 January, oh, how sweet is my country.” They represent the true beat of the streets, all over, free as air, sending a message to all.

About the author:

Hala Salah Eldin Hussein is the editor of Albawtaka Review, an Arabic independent (non-governmental) non-profit online quarterly concerned with translating English short fiction. In January 25, 2011, the Egyptian people went into the streets to topple the regime, and in 18 days, after 30 years, they did it. Says Hussein, “I used to wake up every morning telling myself, ‘This day I’m going to do it. I will topple the regime.’ Now we are free. We are planning to re-build the nation from scratch, and the sky is the limit.”  Alahram weekly is only distributed in Egypt.

More photos at: http://albawtaka.com

The garden at Soekershof

Soekershof:

Jody Joyner’s Land Art & The Amazing

Botanical Gardens of South Africa

With Yvonne de Wit & Herman van Bon

In the narrow meaning of the word, a nest is the spot in which birds lay their egg(s) and hatch. In the Germanic languages it is also used as a name for a sleeping spot or a place where two lovers please each other. In the more natural sense of the word, ‘nest’ means ‘house’. And at home you feel yourselves at home in your own protected surroundings or shelter. People nowadays have simply attached themselves to comfort which modern technology offers us and that actually detaches them from the natural surroundings.

Why then not a nest made of natural material from its own surroundings? Simply to attach to the vicissitudes of nature and to repair your own ecobalans?

This idea is the basis with which Land Art artist Jody Joyner from Tucson, Arizona, U.S.A., has been playing from the end of December at Soekershof; Private Mazes & Botanical Gardens in South Africa, also named Green Cathedral of South Africa.

View larger photos from the gallery please enter the FS button.

……………………………………………………..

Jody Joyner

A studio art major from Tucson, Ariz., she was awarded a Thomas J. Watson Foundation fellowship for her project, “The Art of Place: Where We Are.” She is traveling to the United Kingdom, South Africa, Australia, Japan, and Canada to study how artists visually convey their perceptions of, and connections to, the natural world, how their artwork reflects knowledge of local geographies, and whether art cultivates a sense of place.

Before beginning work at Soekershof in December 2010, she was involved in Landartgenerator in Dubai and a project in the Louvre in Paris. From South Africa she will fly first to Australia to be involved in a project with aboriginals, and from there she will create an object with Inuit in the North of Canada. Her assignment in South Africa was part of Land Art project in South Africa, an initiative of Soekershof,  a private initiative without governmental grants and/or subsidies.

View larger photos from the gallery please enter the FS button.

……………………………………………………..

About the gardeners: Yvonne de Wit & Herman van Bon

Who we (me and my wife Yvonne) are?  Well, best is to google ‘soekershof’ or ‘green cathedral of south africa’. Be aMAZed and feel Welcome. We don’t pretend to be scientists (we just make use of those in a mutual beneficial way) and we are considered as ‘weird’ by some of our neighbours.
OK, visiting Soekershof is a bit of a whimsical experience, but also the proof that a garden does not have to be “boring”. It’s entertaining with a very serious undertone.
And what more: there is an outdoor collection of over 2500 different, registered, species/subspecies/cultivars/etc. of succulent plants from all over the world and we are very proud of that.
It also explains why representives of the SANBI gardens (Kirstenbosch, Karoo, etc.) in South Africa do not want to know about us, but we play nicely with some university gardens, nurseries and collectors around the globe.
You are Welcome!

For more information: http://soekershoflandart.wordpress.com/

©2011 Amy Kollar Anderson

Phyxiated, acrylic on canvas : 12″ x 14″

Babies in Bottles

Amy Kollar Anderson

How an artist goes from painting babies in bottles to a phantasmagoric series based on characters and scenes from “Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There” (phantasmagoric in itself), is just one of the questions that came to mind looking over Amy Kollar Anderson’s work. Anderson’s ‘bottle paintings’ expose a frightfully cold tableau of images recorded by a meandering, surrealistic mind. Alas, whereas babies in bottles (my manacle, not her moniker) once were the province of medical schools, where they were meant to teach, and carnival side shows, where they were meant to shock, Anderson’s paintings do both. While the “Alice” series keeps to the caverns of her imagination, they are more grounded in images that we, as impartial observers (as if there were such things), are not as afraid to imagine. We may have been there, may have done that, but never quite did it this way.

Five of the “Alice” works shown here will be on display at the Hive Gallery and Studios in Los Angeles beginning in March. See how it’s done in “Phyxiated”.

……………………………………………

Phyxiated – Time Lapse Painting

by Amy Kollar Anderson

A time-lapse video of approximately 55 hours total, with 1 frame per minute of Amy painting Phyxiated.  Acrylic on canvas, 12″ x 14″. Score: “The Butcher,” performed by Ape the Ghost. See them on Facebook.

……………………………………………

Anderson on Anderson:

With my paintings, I create narratives about obsession and containment to explore the differences between being in-and-out of control. Containment is revealed through locations with physical barriers, but it can also be addressed through the emotional or psychological condition of the individuals. Obsession can be seen in the multitude of details, or in the characters that are fixated with an object or idea. I attempt to find a balance between contrasting concepts, such as control vs. chaos, attraction vs. repulsion, etc.

I find these worlds through an oblique path, beginning with an idea and then wandering my way into the finished piece through multiple layers of color and patterns. Each layer adds to the complexity of the puzzle, and in turn reveals another part of the puzzle differently, affecting the final piece. This kind of revelation and exploration takes time, often with changes in composition and color, but the process uncovers a more complex and satisfying narrative than first glimpsed in that original idea.

I enjoy the process of creating a completely new environment in each painting, complete with new rules about interactions and colors. The aesthetic involves a contrast of overlapping vintage and modern design elements and untraditional paint choices, such as metallic, fluorescent and interference colors. This subtle psychedelic presentation misdirects the viewer from immediately focusing on the issues presented, therefore adding to the harmony and tension in the narrative.

……………………………………………

View larger photos from the gallery please enter the FS button.

—–

View larger photos from the gallery please enter the FS button.

……………………………………………

About the Artist:

Amy Kollar Anderson lives in Dayton, Ohio, with her husband and their cats. She received her B.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her Master of Humanity with a focus in Fine Arts, from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. For more information about Anderson, visit her web site: http://www.kollaranderson.com.

© 2011 Michael Jantzen

The Sounds of the Sun Pavilion, Concept by Michael Jantzen

Building Art into Architecture

——

Michael Jantzen

The products of architecture often are limited by what materials are available to the architect. Pushing those limits is what makes architecture art, and the architect an artist. For centuries, man has combined mind and materials to achieve artistry of the highest kind in seeking to arrive at various ends: tombs, as in the Great Pyramids of Giza; palaces, as in the Taj Mahal; places of worship, as in the temples of Angkor Wat and the Vatican. But those things have all been done. We are at a stage now where the evolution and development of materials and methods allow contemporary architects the freedom and flexibility to meet today’s social, environmental, geological and geographical challenges in ways never seen before. Michael Jantzen is one of those people whose imagination seeks not only to meet the architectural challenges of today, but also the human needs of tomorrow.

……………………………………………

Michael Jantzen/The Sounds of the Sun Pavilion

[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/michael-jantzenart-chitect-1/thumbs/thumbs_jantzensun1.jpg]
[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/michael-jantzenart-chitect-1/thumbs/thumbs_jantzensun2.jpg]
[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/michael-jantzenart-chitect-1/thumbs/thumbs_jantzensun3.jpg]
[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/michael-jantzenart-chitect-1/thumbs/thumbs_jantzensun4.jpg]
[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/michael-jantzenart-chitect-1/thumbs/thumbs_jantzensun5.jpg]
[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/michael-jantzenart-chitect-1/thumbs/thumbs_jantzensun6.jpg]
[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/michael-jantzenart-chitect-1/thumbs/thumbs_jantzensun7.jpg]

View larger photos from the gallery please enter the FS button.

……………………………………………

The Sounds of the Sun Pavilion is a conceptual proposal for a large structure made of many small, pre-fabricated, square, curved, steel tube components. These components are joined together to form thirteen large interwoven curved elements. One side of each of the large curved square elements is covered with flexible solar cells. The ends of each of the curved elements are formed into large funnel shapes. The solar cells generate electrical power and monitor the random distribution of light as it strikes different surfaces of the pavilion. The excess electricity generated by the solar cells is used to help power the community in which the pavilion is placed.

Some of the electrical energy produced by the solar cells is used to generate electronic sounds based on the random movement of light over the surface of the structure. These random electronic sounds are heard by visitors through speakers, which are mounted inside of the funnel shaped ends of the large interwoven curved elements. These funnel shaped sections are also fitted with electric lights that are illuminated at night, and are also powerd by the solar cells. At night or when the light levels are too low or unvaried, the sounds emitted from the structure are low and constant. When the light levels increase and begin to be monitored by the solar cells, the sounds vary widely in their pattern and volume and are never exactly the same from day to day.

The design of the shape of the pavilion comes from a desire to create a structure with a great deal of complex surface area, relative to the ever changing position of the sun, as it’s light moves over the pavilion through the dayu The curved elements refer to exaggerated versions of the arcs of the sun, as it moves across the sky.

……………………………………………

Michael Jantzen/Super Symmetry

[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/michael-jantzenart-chitect-2/thumbs/thumbs_photoart001.jpg]
[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/michael-jantzenart-chitect-2/thumbs/thumbs_photoart002.jpg]
[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/michael-jantzenart-chitect-2/thumbs/thumbs_photoart003.jpg]
[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/michael-jantzenart-chitect-2/thumbs/thumbs_photoart004.jpg]
[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/michael-jantzenart-chitect-2/thumbs/thumbs_photoart005.jpg]
[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/michael-jantzenart-chitect-2/thumbs/thumbs_photoart006.jpg]
[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/michael-jantzenart-chitect-2/thumbs/thumbs_photoart007.jpg]
[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/michael-jantzenart-chitect-2/thumbs/thumbs_photoart008.jpg]
[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/michael-jantzenart-chitect-2/thumbs/thumbs_photoart009.jpg]
[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/michael-jantzenart-chitect-2/thumbs/thumbs_photoart010.jpg]
[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/michael-jantzenart-chitect-2/thumbs/thumbs_photoart011.jpg]
[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/michael-jantzenart-chitect-2/thumbs/thumbs_photoart012.jpg]
[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/michael-jantzenart-chitect-2/thumbs/thumbs_photoart013.jpg]
[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/michael-jantzenart-chitect-2/thumbs/thumbs_photoart014.jpg]
[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/michael-jantzenart-chitect-2/thumbs/thumbs_photoart015.jpg]
[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/michael-jantzenart-chitect-2/thumbs/thumbs_photoart016.jpg]
[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/michael-jantzenart-chitect-2/thumbs/thumbs_photoart017.jpg]
[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/michael-jantzenart-chitect-2/thumbs/thumbs_photoart018.jpg]
[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/michael-jantzenart-chitect-2/thumbs/thumbs_photoart019.jpg]
[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/michael-jantzenart-chitect-2/thumbs/thumbs_photoart020.jpg]
[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/michael-jantzenart-chitect-2/thumbs/thumbs_photoart021.jpg]

View larger photos from the gallery please enter the FS button.

……………………………………………

©2010 John Dobbs

Untitled #17, 2010. Watercolor and gouache on paper, 4″ x 5 3/4″

Equilibrium/Disequilibrium

In December, I went to the New York City Small Presses Night. I didn’t know about ACA Art Galleries, where it was being held, or about the gallery’s storied history as a bohemian bastion for artists, writers and poets from its founding in 1932, right up to this  day. Of course, the literati and art crowd aren’t bohemian, anymore.  And the fight against artistic expression today isn’t nearly as apocryphal as it appeared to be in the early ‘50s when many ACA affiliates were under Hoover’s gun for their left-leaning swagger. Sufficient to say, and thanks to Dorian Bergen, I learned more about the gallery that night than about any of the alternative presses and publishing houses I’d set out to discover.

What got the conversation started was a question about the work of Deloss McGraw, one of the many artists in ACA’s stable. (Is that unkind, comparing an artist to a horse? After all, who pulls the cart?) I’d met McGraw at W. D. Snodgrass’ poetry reading at the Downtown Writer’s Center, a program of the YMCA of Greater Syracuse, shortly before Snodgrass passed away in January 2009. McGraw has illustrated hundreds of Snodgrass’ poems, and there were dozens on the walls at the Y to commemorate their longstanding creative relationship. There were dozens more — and larger — at ACA.

The conversation with Bergen progressed (as it should have, this being a progressive affair, and all), to the work of John Barnes Dobbs, whose exhibit, “Equilibrium/Disequilibrium”, dominated more than half the gallery’s exhibit space.  Dobbs (b. 1931), a long-time associate of the gallery, had requested the gallery hold a retrospective of his work, and they kindly obliged, offering up one room, which soon expanded well beyond. In the end, that wasn’t a bad thing. At first look, the drawings and paintings seemed unfinished, almost like studies for works to come. But in moving from one image to another evolved  a humorous fascination with the human condition in form and function. Reason enough to side with history and bring his work to Ragazine readers.

– MRF

……………………………………………

View larger photos from the gallery please enter the FS button.

……………………………………………

From the catalog:

John Dobbs is an accomplished draftsmen and painter who has exhibited widely for over fifty years since his first show in New York in 1959.  His work depicts a wide range of subjects from contemporary politics, urban landscape and portraits to interior scenes.  Inspired by observations and experiences from his own life, he draws on his memories and impressions as a source for his work.

Dobbs on Dobbs:

I spent my first seven years in a small house built for Erie Lackawana Railroad workers, the same company that had hired my grandfather as a railway express clerk many years before. The house was right across the street from the railroad embankment; a fascinating, forbidden playground, impossible to resist.  The shining rails gave me my first example of one-point perspective as they raced toward the next town down the line.  My father was a leftist, a skeptic, and a closet poet.  My mother was a pianist.  Art, music, and literature were as integral to my boyhood as baseball and running wild.  Politics was mother’s milk.

I’ve always been, in part, a painter of protest.  I was in the army during the Korean War, in Algeria during their War of Independence, in Paris when terrorist bombs were a nightly soundtrack, and I was back in the states during the passions of Vietnam.  In short, war has been one of my themes.  Anger has always been a dependable fuel for my work.  I was disappointed in humanity, which, I suppose, is a grand way of saying I was disappointed in myself.  I expect a lot from both.

Some years ago a Mexican priest and a rabbi approached me independently of each other at one of my openings and said, “Your work is beautiful, and disturbing.”  To me, that’s the ultimate compliment.  When I hear that I feel I’ve hit the mark.  I’ve never made a painting with the sole idea of selling it.  And I’m not afraid to say that I’ve made paintings that could be hard to live with.  I’ve strived to give representations and metaphors of social life which is, inevitably, an aspect of political life as well.

Art to me has always been a way to make sense of violence, war, and the overwhelming dynamics of human life; street life, metaphorical life, a soldier’s life, the closing skyline and the open road.  I’ve loved working with themes: highways, motel rooms, automobiles, or people in windows who always seem to me like a secret being half-revealed.  This is probably my last show, and the theme is balance and imbalance, equilibrium and disequilibrium; moving between the one and the other, trying not to fall.

For information, and to see more of Dobbs’ work, visit:

http://www.acagalleries.com

ACA Galleries, 529 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-2800
(212) 206-8080

Interview:

Artist in Flux

With Michael Foldes

Born in 1972, Amy Swartelé grew up in Belgium, Holland and England. Her mother was a dancer, and her father a businessman who also wrote poetry. If Hieronymous Bosch were alive today, he likely would have no problem at all deciphering the imagery manifest in her paintings.

Swartelé’s work combines the technical knowledge of the chemist who mixes the paints, the precise craftsmanship of the painter who applies it, and the ability to translate surreal, often disturbing visions from a wellspring of inspiration that resonates between mind and matter. Flux, Swartelé’s show in September at the Jungle Science Gallery featured recent paintings that depict subjects, some of whom appear to drowning, as seen in or through pale liquid. Or, perhaps, more in keeping with her recent interest in quantum science, who could as easily be stranded in the divergent planes of parallel and intersecting universes.

Swartelé’s earlier series, Flesh and Bone, was not much in evidence at this show. It explores the relationships of objects in the physical world, the cycles of life and death, the examination and metamorphosis of common influences, organic components, the disintegration of flesh, the remnants of bone. She literally digs into the big questions, “What is life?” “What does it all mean?” “Why are we here, and what do we all have to do with one another?”  Her answers are not for everyone, but they influenced Jungle Science’s Brent Williamson enough to give her a show, and to suggest we also take notice.

The following edited interview with Swartelé took place in September, the morning after the closing reception, at Java Joe’s, a noisy little coffee shop in downtown Binghamton. Swartelé’s husband, Michael Yeomans, sat in on the conversation. Both Swartelé and Yeomans are professors in the art department at State University of New York-Potsdam. Yeomans teaches studio art, and Swartelé, who teaches painting, commented that most of her students must take his course before hers, so she has confidence in their abilities to draw.

Ragazine (to Yeomans): Do you also exhibit?

Yeomans: Yes, I do, but I would have to say of the two of us, Amy is much more driven in the exhibition portion of her career than I am. Amy is a painter who teaches at a university, whereas I’m a university professor who makes art….

Swartelé: I think that’s accurate

R: When I was looking through your web site, it says:  “I can explore the parade that my own psyche offers – absurdity, grotesquerie, a carnival of demons and freaks, which may frighten, fascinate and seduce….”  You have a sort of transmogrification of your environment. What drove you to that in the first place?

S: In terms of transformation, the very fundamental idea that the only constant is change, that everything is changing all the time no matter how much we may try to deny it, ignore it, pretend it’s not there. We like to think of ourselves and the world around us of having some constancy. It’s more comfortable and our brains like going down the same neural patterns all the time, but honestly, I don’t believe that’s how the world is, and I don’t believe that’s the way we are. We’re constantly changing moment by moment, on everything from your quantum level exchanging particles with the world around you to your thoughts, your feelings. You’re thinking different things right now than you were five minutes ago. I think part of the work is an attempt to both deal with and embrace the circumstances of constant change, so that’s where some of the transmogrification comes from, and the metamorphosis of one form into another form.

I have a great love of ideas, of evolution, hybridization, metamorphosis, from old mythological tales, to more fundamental scientific shifts. The potentials and possibilities of change are so much more interesting to me, are so much more exciting and optimistic in spirit, to my mind, than ideas of things staying the same. That is just worst than death.

R: But a lot of people see change in a different direction than you see it.

S: Right, which is part of why I’m painting about it, because from my point of view it’s not this evil, you know….

R: But is this a lot of what you imagined when you were in India? I can see that being more in line with that reality you perceive.

S: Well certainly some of the ideas come through Buddhist philosophy I’ve read. So that’s definitely been an influence in thinking in that direction.

Both when I was in India a few years ago and just now in China, in Tibet, there’s a very different perspective on what your reality is and how it’s formed and how the world changes your perception of reality. So I don’t know if I would say I have seen what I expected… I hardly ever see what I expect. I’m almost always surprised….

R: Yes?

S: In degree if not in type, do you know what I mean?

R: Michael, did you travel with Amy to India or China or Tibet?

Y: No, she gets to go to all these places on her own.

S: Michael is both a less experienced and less adventurous traveler than I am.

Y: I have no desire to see it … filthy, disgusting …. (laughs).

S: Third world situations (Amy laughs).

R: You mean where you wrap yourself around the toilet?

S: I have been to the hospital a couple of times (laughing). About everyone at the arts colony had dysentery. The arts colony where I was in India – everybody got sick at one time or another.  One girl got bitten by a monkey and had to go through the rabies shot deal. I had severe gastroenteritis, two other people had GE, one person had gotten parasites of some kind. And it seems like the only people who didn’t (get sick) were people who had spent a lot of time in country already and had some experience.

R: Yes, some immunity.’You have mentioned something about the Heisenberg principal? What is that?

S: Well the couple of things I mentioned in the artist statement that come from quantum physics… I should modify all of this somewhat by saying that I’m in no way any kind of expert on things to do with quantum physics, but the ideas that reading about quantum physics generate for me, those are what interest me… even though what I understand about them may be off the standard ones, but essentially the uncertainty principal…. Do you know about the Schrödinger’s thought experiment? It’s a thought experiment where you took a cat and put it in a box, and there were, I forget the details of it, but essentially, you know when a nuclear structure breaks down and the half life, where it deteriorates, the point of it is that you put the cat in the box, you can’t see inside the box, there is a breakdown of an (radioactive) element that at a certain point may or may not kill the cat. You don’t know at any point if the cat is alive or dead or what….

The whole idea behind the thought experiment is to kind of illustrate what has been found with light particles — light can be a particle or a wave, right? And there’s the idea that the observer affects the experiment. It’s been proven that through the very act of observation, the nature of the light particles or light waves is altered.

So the Schrödinger’s cat experiment merely posits the idea the cat is both alive and dead and sort of neither alive nor dead until you open the box and take a look. Because until it is observed, it’s the same as that particle of light, it’s sort of in that in-between stage, it hasn’t decided, for lack of a better word, it can’t be alive or dead. You can’t know the position and speed of the particles at the same time –. because the act of observation literally changes reality, which for an artist, what an interesting idea is that, that for every possible event in the universe a new universe jumps into play, leaps into existence. So that’s the multi-verse theory.

That uncertainty principal has to do with the positioning of limbo, sort of everything and nothing in a circumstance of potentiality, but nothing’s come into being yet. I’m a huge believer in contradictions, and this idea of being in that situation where anything is possible and depending on how you perceive or if you perceive you might push the universes in a particle direction. So the potentiality of that excites me. I take the interpretation of those things that are happening on the quantum level, and I think of them on the macro level, and of course as far as the physicists, everybody will tell you that you can’t make the jump, but on the larger level the whole Newtonian universe still very much holds sway. It’s only on the quantum level that things go nuts.

But I like thinking how to take those ideas that come from the quantum level and apply them to a more macro level, that to me is where the fun is.

R: well that’s reflected more in your Flux paintings than in your …. Fesh and Bone.

S: Well the shift from Flesh and Bone to Flux, in Flesh and Bone I was still thinking about how things interact with each other, and the idea of perception being reciprocal and that everything … that if I interact with you it’s not only me acting on you but you acting on me … how you’re responding affects how I act, and it’s the very cyclical nature of any kind of interaction, both between people and people and their physical surroundings….

But when I got to what was for me the end of Flesh and Bone I had gotten very frustrated with how still and static all my forms were, and that they might be interacting on a psychological and emotional level, but they weren’t as dynamic as I feel the world is, and so I had to start breaking the forms loose and creating dynamism in the form of themselves for me to be able to reflect that idea.

R: Just as a brief aside, you see realities here, but that explains why anybody would say it’s a lot of fun to watch…

S: Like at the closing last night, people watching, awesome, at an opening or closing event you get all kinds.

R: You talk about quarks Charm and Strange… What is quark Charm?

S: Names of different quarks are Up (quark), Down, Charm, Strange … These are names of particles in quantum physics– the beauty of that. I love that.

R: How many are there altogether?

S: Six…. I  forget the others. There are two others. (Top quark and Bottom are the other two. – ed note:).

R: You mentioned having a corporate sponsor. Who is your corporate sponsor?

S: The family company is Soparind/Bongrain. An international food business. (Soparind-Bongrain is an international independent food corporation based in France. It consists of a hundred companies established in 24 countries. The group employs 21,000 people throughout the world. – ed. note)

………………………………………………………….

Amy Swartele

[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/amy-swartele/thumbs/thumbs_image001.jpg]
[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/amy-swartele/thumbs/thumbs_image006.jpg]
[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/amy-swartele/thumbs/thumbs_image005-1.jpg]
[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/amy-swartele/thumbs/thumbs_image002-1.jpg]
[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/amy-swartele/thumbs/thumbs_image007.jpg]
[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/amy-swartele/thumbs/thumbs_image003-1.jpg]
[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/amy-swartele/thumbs/thumbs_image004-1.jpg]
[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/amy-swartele/thumbs/thumbs_image002.jpg]
[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/amy-swartele/thumbs/thumbs_image004.jpg]
[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/amy-swartele/thumbs/thumbs_image003.jpg]
[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/amy-swartele/thumbs/thumbs_image005.jpg]
[img src=http://ragazine.cc/wp-content/flagallery/amy-swartele/thumbs/thumbs_restrain800x72.jpg]

View larger photos from the gallery please enter the FS button.

………………………………………………………….

R: I’m impressed that they would sponsor…. I think a lot of U.S. companies would have a hard time sponsoring your work. I think they would shy away. “Oh my god, we’re going to lose breakfast cereal sales…”

S: Well that’s one of the things with the commission, because the paintings are going to be in their new corporate headquarters in France. (Turns to Michael.) What’s the word Alex uses, torture?

He told me, I did a commission for them several years ago and that’s how this whole thing developed, and the first commission was …. I had much tighter guidelines on what they wanted for what at the time was going to be their new international headquarters.

That all turned out well. Still lifes…. I spent a couple of months touring their companies learning about their business, and it was very much based on the imagery that came out of that. But actually some of the meat  imagery that comes up in Flesh and Bone came out of the factories.

R: Are you a vegetarian?

S: Yeah, I am …. (laughs). But then a few years ago, when I had opportunities for the exhibits, I stayed in touch with Alex and that kind of thing, and I approached him and asked if he’d be interested in sponsoring some of these exhibits and that all worked out, and now that they’re building a new international headquarters, he approached me to do this new commission. We met and I’m working on the designs now. He actually was my sponsor for this last trip to China. The new group of paintings is not meant to deal with their business at all, but to reflect the expanding international nature of their business. So I said “Ooooh, where do I get to go?”

“… Hence the China trip, so I’m developing a series of designs that I am going to show him based on different places around the world, sometimes literally, sometimes more abstract, more conceptual sort of images.

Y: And only one of the only other “guidelines.”

S: “I have only one guideline, the paintings are not allowed to be torture,” which is how he describes much of my work…. The paintings are not allowed to depict torture. So I’m going to show him a number of images. He’ll pick the ones that appeal to him the most and I’ll base the paintings on those images.

R: What did your parents do, what kind of influence did they have on your work? Was your father a physicist? Was your mother a physicist?

S: No, my mother (who is Belgian) was actually a dancer…. and she also writes short stories. My father (an American) actually writes poetry, though he’s a businessman. I will say this, they were always completely encouraging of anything artistic.

R: Did you pull wings from flies when you were  a kid?

S: I didn’t actually find painting as my first love until I was in college. Until then I was split evenly between acting and visual art. I did a lot of theater in college. I was a double major in theater and art.  It wasn’ until I got to my senior year in college and I had an acting thesis lined up and a painting thesis lined up and I said, Oh hell…. and picked painting. Mainly because in the studio you have utter control over what you do. You’re god for what it is you can create on that canvas. You can do anything. In acting you’re at the mercy of the casting director, and everybody else. Your choices, artistically are far more limited.

R: What about painter influences…. ? I mean there are a lot of Flemish and Dutch artists who were into some very bizarre ….

S: Yes, yes…. Breugel and Bosch always were very early influences. One of the first reproductions of paintings I remember seeing was in a Flemish comic book I read as a child. Suske and Wiske.  There’s one episode where the characters jump into a Bosch painting where the characters come alive.

The tradition of Flemish painting is so strong … you’ve just got a world of painters to choose from ….  Bosch, Rembrandt, van Gogh, Magritte, you know not the CoBrA people so much, but certainly the surrealists, certainly the magical realists, certainly Van Eyck and all the old masters there, and the tradition of what I think a lot of modern day eyes … that sort of grotesque still lives, but with glorious texture and color and … finding beauty in that detritus of form is an influnce… Francis Bacon, big influence. Lucian Freud, big influence. I mean, I tend to jump around at any given point depending on what it is I’m trying to do that will affect the people I’m looking at at that given time….

R: What is your process? Do you start with a drawing? Like for this commission?

S: I generally have an idea that I’m working with but the start is always the idea. Then I find the imagery that will help me develop that idea. My process is enormously fluid, so having to come up with a design for this commission is counter to my usual process.

My usual process, I start with an idea and I’ll find a couple of images from photographs I’ve taken or objects I’m collecting… I think I mentioned last night all the dead animals in my studio. I get my dentist to give me teeth she pulls out of people’s mouths. I collect things from junkyards. When I say I’m a scavenger I mean that quite literally. I really do grab stuff from all over. So I’ll start with a couple of things that I’ve scavenged, photographs or objects… Those will start to get developed on canvas and then usually what happens is they get moved, changed in size, painted over, combined with another form….

My process has a lot of metamorphosis in it. It’s very transformational. The end product usually looks nothing like where I started because where I’m working I’m responding to what I’ve got on canvas and that very fluid process allows me…  means for me my subconscious comes into play a lot more. These are not planned things, these are things that whatever it is I have on canvas… “Oh, I  really want to give it peace now,” or I want to make it do this, or I want to make it have an interaction with this other thing….

And usually I know when I’m on the right track…. When I really have to kind of stop and question myself and say this is really weird, bizarre, or it’s just plain silly, but I really want to do it anyway. (So I say to myself) “OK, just let’s do it.”

R: How do you work in pastels? It’s not so easy to cover over.

S: But it has the upside of being very quick compared to oils, which makes a nice shift, and actually, with fixative … Yes, it alters the color a bit and all that, but it allows you to layer in a bit more than you might be able to do otherwise. I think it’s really useful to shift materials a little bit that way every now and then because it forces you into solutions you wouldn’t find otherwise.  So by playing with pastels, then when I go back to the paint, I do paint differently. That to me is useful.

R: What about the commissions, are you taking photographs you’ll use later? Or is it all mental images, or do you sketch?

S: No, I’m sketching the designs that I’m going to show in France. They are essentially paint sketches. I’m sketching. I took about 2000 photographs on the trip. I’ve got about 3000 photographs that I’m working from.

R: Digital imagery saves thousands and you don’t generally screw up, and if you do you see it right away….

S: I’m also interviewing people from countries I haven’t been to, talking to them about
“What’s this place mean to you?”,”If fyou had to describe an image to me that embodies his place, what is it?”  So I’m trying to gataher information in different ways, I’m reading myths from different countries …

R: There’s something in a review of your work, “rendered in hues once deemed inappropriate…” I don’t understand that. I don’t know what hues would be inappropriate. Does that mean anything to you or is that sort of like somebody’s…?

S: Someone else’s take? I would say what was meant maybe was not in terms of color, but maybe because I’ve taken some things which are generally thought of as pleasnt things and made them grotesque and vice versa. That maybe it’s that shift that’s being talked about.

R: So he’s not really talking color, he’s talking something else ….

S: That sounds like flowery, rhetorical language …

R: How do you get that luminous quality on the surface, is that an overcoat of lacquer? Or is that in the paint itself?

S: It’s in the paint itself. .I glaze hell out of my paints. Glazing is when you have translucent layers of paint, a little bit of pigment, lots of medium.  I really play with the viscosity of my paint a lot. I’m moving back and forth between very opaque to very thin, almost transparent stuff. Thick and thin. The physicality of oil is one of the most glorious things about it. You can do anything with oils. And glazes. I’m sort of a glaze queen.  I love to glaze, And the reason for that is, you can literally…. say you have two pigments, mix them together opaquely you get a certain color. If you put one color in a glaze and put it over the other color in a glaze, you will end up with a visually completely different color than if you mixed them opaquely because the light is having to move through multiple layers and simply interacting with those pigments differently..

When you have an opaque layer of paint on top, the light just hits that top layer and bounces right off. But if you have multiple translucent layers, that kind of interior luminosity that you get, you’re literally doing that through how you’re building your paint layer. You get a richness of color that way.

R: You can’t do it like that with acrylic …

S: Well you can glaze with acrylic, but to my mind acrylic doesn’t do it as well. There are all sorts of glaze out there for acrylic now, so you can glaze with acrylic, but to my eye it doesn’t have the richness that oil has.

R: I know you have to finish taking down the show, and drive back to Potsdam… Thank you for your time.

A: And thank you, too.

To see more images, and for more information about Belgian-American painter Amy Swartelé, see http://www.amyswartelé.com.

Meditations in Metal

Occasionally something catches the eye, whether the barb is uniqueness, simplicity, or a blast of heat that melts into the imagination. Miya Ando’s metal plates exhibit simplicity, but that minimalism is based upon what is seen, not what is hidden within the crafting of the object, or within the viewer, the complex melding of which determines whether and how the object comes to life.  In this case, one opens the mind’s eye to enter a world captured in the metamorphosis from cold hard steel to cold hard steel with a contemplative soul.

A Publication of Spool MFG

The Art & Recycling

Spool MFG is an independently owned and operated art space in Johnson City, New York, sponsored in large part by Don DeMauro, founder, artist and retired art professor from Binghamton University. The governing board is comprised of friends, many of whom are artists, with a common interest in achieving Spool’s stated goal: a commitment ”to the existential, personal, social, and political dimensions of the contemporary moment.”

Spool is the namesake of the factory that occuped the building in which it is housed, ”Spool & MFG”, but the ampersand had been dropped somewhere along the way. The publication, ampersand, puts it back into play in a somewhat esoteric fashion.

Much more than the usual bound version of a poetry chapbook, ampersand is a collection of poetry and visual art printed, drawn and written on the pages of invoices, bills, advertisements, checks, ledger sheets, folders, binders and every other kind of suitable surface found in files that had not seen light for 40 or 50 years since the building shut down as an industrial site.

The images that follow are pages from the book, some printed on the back side of ledgers, others drawn or painted on the front. A number of the edition of 50 will be distributed among the contributors, and the remainder will be sold. Each copy contains original hand-made entries, thus assuring that each ‘book’ is one-of-a-kind.

(for a larger view, click on images)

Page 2: Mission Statement/Don DeMauro

Page 6: Description/Alisa Strassner

Page 7: Cyanotype/Miles McNulty

Page 9: David Chirico

Page 14: Don DeMauro

Page 22: Andy Stevens

-30-

Dia-de-lluvia

Redemption and Rebirth

There are two major influences that drive an artist in the execution of their work. The fist is internal which is composed of the past and their interpretation of individual memories.  The second is their present which is the current interaction with people and the culture that surrounds them.

There is also a third dimension that separates good artists and great artists. This is the ability to see their place in the future history of art. To have an incredible work ethic and personal sense of accountability that transcends tomorrow and into the years ahead.  It is the pursuit of a dream, and desire to fulfill a destiny.

In the pursuit of his current work he is brutally honest in seeking out the truth of his past, transcribing it into the symbolism of his work today and understanding its impact and value well into the future.

Jean Marc Calvet is like the perfect storm.  Born in Nice, France in 1965, the first 37 years of his life brewed malevolently bringing him to a point well beyond desperation; a hell on earth.  He wanted to end his own life.

The catalyst that bankrupts a human being to the point of emotional, physical, and spiritual madness can be attributed to a multitude of factors, or a single tragic event.  It is the point where all that was familiar and understood begins to slip away into a gray world lacking definition.  It is a place where time holds no relevance or sense of structure; the past and present melt together to create its own distorted sense of unreality.  It is a place where the soul’s monsters celebrate freedom in a frenzied orgy of self destruction and external mayhem.

Whichever road this insidious evil chooses to take, the impact is both devastating and all consuming.

Jean Marc Calvet with his self-portrait, El Otro.

There is only one hope for salvation.  On very rare occasions, the soul is miraculously graced with an exit from this nightmare downward journey with a passage marked “Redemption”.

Calvet discovered his path to salvation; his mission…….to paint.

He is a legitimate self-taught artist, an outsider in every spirit of the word.  His first works were crude explosions of his inner turmoil exploding on any surface that was close with any materials that would leave a trace.

Having never been taught to draw or paint, or ever having had any interest in art, he is a true original.

However as Ed Mc Cormack Managing Editor of Gallery and Studio Magazine said very astutely:

“There is a very real danger for an artist as brilliant as Calvet in having too colorful a back-story.  It is too easy for the legend to flourish at the expense of the art.  (Just think how many people know nothing about van Gogh except that he cut off his ear.)  That Calvet happens to be self-taught only complicates matters.  It could too easily get him relegated to the gilded ghetto of so-called “outsider art” and deprived of his rightful place in the mainstream art world, where he most definitely belongs, given the innate sophistication of his vision and the accomplished technique with which he makes it manifest on canvas. ”

A retrospective view of his work shows a distinct and stepped development in his technical and artistic skills over the years.  However the work is always definitively recognizable as the product of Calvet with hallmarks that remain constant.

Seven years on, Calvet delivers a marked sophistication in his works that adds clarity yet maintains the spirit of the true brut style that birthed him as an artist.  His repertoire of colors continues to develop giving a richness that further enhances his work. The large scale of his works adds to the impressive impact they make.  He has continued to increase his canvases on occasion giving him ample room to evoke his stories with subjects that still explode out of a Pandora’s Box with his own brand of manmade monsters.  Each of his creatures is vivid with emotion and their own individual stories.  Now instead of the creatures wreaking havoc on Calvet personally, he is able to release them and imprison them on canvas.

Collage of Jean Marc Calvet by Larry Hamill

Calvet works with a ferocity that defies most; often working non-stop until a work is complete.  He is regularly found to be painting 12-18 hour days and so despite the intensity and detail required to complete one work, he is able to turn out a generous volume of work.  It is this work ethic and an accountability that he shows in his work of his prior life and his pursuit of a bright future that ensures the dynamism of his work.  Despite his output, the works are never repetitive or tired.  His commitment to the creativity that wells from within him is absolute.

Today, Calvet is based in Granada, Nicaragua.  He has exhibited his work in Europe, the United States and South America including several solo shows in New York and Nicaragua.  His work is held in several private collections and work is about to placed in several museums.  His life story has also been captured in a feature documentary which is planned to premier next year.

Calvet is a charismatic man, warm and generous.  On first impressions you might not imagine him to be the source of his paintings.  However salvation can be a slippery slope and he understands the warning:

“Those who forget where they came from are bound to relive their past”

Looking at Jean Marc Calvet’s paintings allows you to experience an explosive visual arts experience and glimpse the depths of his soul from the safety of the other side of the canvas, a place that he also stands today thanks to the grace of redemption.

-Bob Hogghe,  Monkdogz Gallery,  New York

………………………………………..

View larger photos from the gallery please enter the FS button.

………………………………………..

Jean Marc Calvet began painting at a point in is life when severe crisis metamorphosed into a form of redemption and rebirth. With no training, he discovered the need to paint by complete chance.

Not only did it save him but it changed his life. Art is his catharsis and his evolution has been astounding. For him, it is about exorcising the insanity of his past and slapping down on canvas the dirty truth of life. He paints 14 hours a day, seven days a week and lives now in Nicaragua.

* * *

“Yo pinto por necesidad …. sin pensar, una especie de automatismo libre.  Dejo que mi inconsciente dirija  mi mano. Cultivando  las obsesiones, los miedos, seguramente para poder sentir y apreciar las buenas cosas de la vida.

“Yo creo que los artistas ante de todo son antenas, receptor de emociones, puertas, pasaje adentro de diferentes mundos.

“En mis pinturas cada personaje esta lleno de historias, creaturas,  un movimiento permanente de muerte, amor, sexo, de vida simplemente. Somos hechos de detalles nuestra vidas están  ritmadas por ellos, sin ellos no existimos……….. Nos volvemos trasparente.

“Afuera somos palabras y adentro somos colores …”

-Jean Marc Calvet

* * *

To view others works including his poetry visit: http://jmcalvet.com

Copyright © 2010 – Jean Marc Calvet

A Path in Delta, oil on canvas, 23.6” x 19.7”, 2010

A wonderful state of mind

______________________________

The Artist’s View

The matter of landscape as a state of mind is essentially a very vast domain.

The landscape in art is an expression of the human spirit, particularly due to the communion of man with nature, his material and spiritual house. Each man is part of a matrix, of a specific universe, a part of an area with individualist and morphologic character. Each of us feels a resonance in front of a pattern, created in our minds by the very area we grew up in, the places of our childhood where our character was formed.

No matter where we then go in life, we carry these marks of our memory. Landscape and nature have surrounded me since I was a little child, they gave me the joy of a deep and truthful living and I have always been attached to the clear atmosphere of the marks of my own memory, rooted in my own space. Whether it is abstraction, expression or impression, they are all related to the representation of the same motif: nature displayed through landscape.

Nature is for me as a basis for the comfort of the soul, reverie, calm and faith. I had different views on my artistic itinerary, different representations of the same universal motif, nature.

This work represents a synthesis of my artistic and expression research of the last years.

Reeds on Water

The essential motivation of choosing this analysis theme comes from my belief in  the force of expression of the landscape, the simple message of nature and its echo in our souls, the state of mind conveyed by the landscape (whether on a macro or micro level).

“My motivation is purely pictorial, it is the art of turning the landscape into a wonderful state of mind.”

— Claudiu Presecan

A Curator’s View

“…In the creative strategy of this creation stage (solidly underlain in theory by the systematic investigation of the impressionist painting) the primordial factor of provocation is nature – pure existence, homogenous, non-sequential and all-comprehensive, while the motivation of the pictorial act is the re-experience of a paradisiacal state, of total participation at the mysteries of a genuine nature, of grand expansive vitality: the nature of the Danube Delta.

And the reeds and the water lilies – innate beauty from waters, are felt as a real archetypal symbol of this miraculous and fascinating encounters with moving still waters, earth flooded with vegetation and sun bathed skies – which is the Delta. To this nature, which ignores anthropomorphism (as it is ready only to attract, absorb and protect the fragile human being) the artist relates as to a constant and explicit guiding mark (he doesn’t suppress the natural referent nor does he put it in brackets), but he considers the referential activity from a double perspective; the one of his own sensitivity of poetic essence and of his endowment of colorist and drawer – admirably polished by a sustained atelier practice) and the cultural perspective of the passionate dialogue with an already existent visual code: the morphologic and syntactic code of the impressionist art. In other words, the artist proposes, in an attractive and persuasive way, a dialogue style of his own (with undisguised cultural appetence) with a style historically constituted (in the 19th century) long persistent (towards the half of the 20th century) in the modern painting and assertively re-introduced in actuality (in different aspects), in post-modernity. The reception charm, the lyrical exultance of the immediate experience are expressed in simple and undulating forms, built with a simple drawing, in a fluid and sonant color, dominated by cold accords – only partially autonomous in relationship with the motif: virtuous drawing and vibrant chromatics, masterly enhanced in value by the excellent domination of the white extended with oriental refinement on large surfaces. Besides this explosive hedonism, the intensity of the artist’s sight is exerted stupendously in the decoding (in the very act of painting with detached gesture) of sub-adjacent dynamic structures, of an expressive order, beyond the strict horizon of appearances. Clear and aired, refined without ostentation and lyric without sentimentalism, the images of the reeds and water lilies – crossed by harmonious rhythms, with expressive accents and energetic resonances, become spaces, without any narrative ballast, of some thrilling communication ritual with a fraternal, cordial cosmos.  Each and every one of them composes a sensitive pictorial essay about a personal poetics of purity.”

—Dr. Livia Drăgoi, Director, Art Museum Cluj-Napoca, 2008

To view larger photos from the gallery, please enter the FS button.

………………………………………………….

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Born on April 12, 1969 in Cluj-Napoca, a city located deep in the heart of Romania’s legendary Transylvania, Claudiu Presecan received his B.F.A. from the Cluj-Napoca High School of Fine Arts in 1987. From there, he pursued graduate studies in painting at the Cluj-Napoca Visual Arts Academy which ultimately lead to his earning a Masters of Fine Arts. He has exhibited in Romania, Denmark, South Africa, Hungary, Germany, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Taiwan, Turkey, Canada and United States.

The famous Transylvanian silversmiths, Sacks and Szeckler, together with Judaic, Armenian and Turkish artists, brought about a special contribution to the expressive fusion of Transylvanian art. This provided inspiration for contemporary Romanian artists. Presecan’s art reflects the period of graphic art borne between traditional and modern language, and contributes to modern Romanian culture — a fresh contrast to Transylvania’s legendary, dark history.

________________________________

website and blog:  http://www.presecan.com/

email: claudiu@presecan.com

Fredrick Broden vs photography at the Clark/Oshin Gallery

Texas-based photographer Fredrik Broden’s work has appeared in Time, Wired, the New York Times Magazine and GQ. The Swedish artist’s conceptual work is direct and humorous, leaving no question to its intended message.

Fredrick Broden vs photography

Clark/Oshin Gallery

June 5 – July 16

5450 Wilshire Boulevard

Los Angeles California 90036

Engaged Observers: Documentary Photography since the Sixties at The Getty Center.

Photojournalism in the second half of the 20^th century gets the Getty treatment in this fantastic exhibition of independent photojournalists whose work has diversified from magazine spreads into powerful book-length projects that have documented the world. Both are on display here by such photojournalist luminaries as W. Eugene Smith, Lauren Greenfield and Leonard Freed with images from the American Civil War to turn of the century activism.

Engaged Observers: Documentary Photography since the Sixties

The Getty Center
June 29–November 14, 2010

West Pavilion, Terrace Level,

J. Paul Getty Museum,

1200 Getty Center Drive,

Los Angeles, CA 90049

Eye Photo at the Bob Poe Gallery

Bob Poe’s i-Phone photography is exhibited at the photographer’s gallery at Bergamot Station and features intimate i-Phone images of the human eye and one non-human eye for viewers to guess.

Eye Photo

June 19 – August 15

Bob Poe Photographic Art

Bergamot Station

2525 Michigan Ave., Gallery G8A

Santa Monica, CA 90404

Ginger Liu

A face is just a mask

… 

A face is just a mask, a covering to protect the soul.  The mask is a disguise to hide what one is by appearing as something else.  Inherently we are all the same inside and out.  Regardless of race, creed or color of our skin, we are all human beings.
I consider myself to be a human being and a student of the human condition. I am a barometer that measures the relative pressure of society.  As a result, I am an Artist.
My purpose is to be an observer of life, to better understand myself and my place in the world, to touch others and allow myself to be touched by them and to create deep spiritual connections to myself and those around me.
I investigate these themes through mask-like portraiture, stylized landscapes, woodblock and monoprints.
My work explores a desire to communicate effectively. Most often with great frustration I fail. Sometimes I have moments of soul to soul connection. 

— Roy Grillo 

… 

The eyes, from top to bottom: Roy Grillo, George Clooney, Al Pacino, Anthony Hopkins.

Other works…

I ask the question “Where are we going?”  My answer is “Home.” The Landscapes are the journey and the destination.…
 

 Road Home III Oil pastel on paper 16″ x 20″ 

Road Home IV Oil pastel on paper 12″ x 20″ 

Road Home Oil pastel on paper 12″ x 20″ 

Untitled. Pastel on paper.  

………………………………………… 

“Why do we create art? What does the artist see that the viewer is unable or unwilling to see? The answer for me is to encourage people to exercise the courage to open their minds and not be afraid to feel and to reach out to your neighbor. Who am I? Where do I fit in? What is really going on? These thoughts are what drive’s my journey. I am not trying to master my craft as it pertains to mediums which are the reasons why my techniques are varied.  I am trying to master life and to be a master of my own destiny. Each medium has a life and a direction that it wants to go. I simply let it be. Depending on the subject, the ideas and feelings I want to convey. I have been influenced by Picasso and his business acumen. By Van Gogh and his struggle. I have studied the German expressionists and their mastery of so many genre. I have read Machiavelli and can relate it to our existence now. Mostly I am moved by my own thoughts, past, present and future and my relationship to those in the struggle to survive.”  

-Roy Grillo 

………………………………………… 

Roy Grillo’s website: http://www.roygrillo.com/
Grillo can be contacted at: roygrillo@bigplanet.com  

The Encaustic Photograph

Images to Last a Lifetime

Artist Charles Bremer has explored a wide breadth of creative medium in his career ranging from photography and drawing to theater stage sets, sculpture and experimental sound. His work has been exhibited in galleries, museums and art centers both in the United States and internationally. Most of his graphic work explores a synthesis of the natural elements with the human body through his highly developed method of hand painted prints. He is an accomplished master in the technique of encaustic wax glazing. His recent exhibitions have included a study of old art supplies, collaborative project exploring text and image, and a photographic series Two Dancers at the National Museum of Dance.

Beginning in the mid 1980’s, in collaboration with his wife Martha, he hosted a series of regional exhibitions exploring the natural elements in art. These large exhibitions; Waterways, Art on the Wind, Earthworks, and Art on Fire brought together many artists to share themes related to environmental concern and understanding important to the upstate region. Much of Bremer’s work has aimed to educate and celebrate the importance of protected natural spaces both urban and rural. He has designed unique teaching programs for young students emphasizing the art of listening and unique outdoor instruments activated by the natural forces: wind, fire, and water.

Upcoming projects for 2010 include publication of a photographic portfolio by the University of Utah; an aeolian harp installation at the Crane School of Music in Potsdam, NY; and an exhibition of encaustic wax images at the Anthony Brunelli Gallery, Binghamton. Charles Bremer is married to Martha Bremer. They have three daughters. Their workshops and studios are located along Briar Creek in Otego, New York.

— John Brunelli

Photo-Oil-Paint-Tubes, Photograph with Encaustic Glaze

Felix, Plein Air, Photograph with Encaustic Glaze

Fireside-Studios-Pigment, Photograph with Encaustic Glaze

Kodak-Sky-Filter, Photograph with Encaustic Glaze

Leaf, Photograph with Encaustic Glaze