Looking for Spring

We took an early morning walk by the Connecticut River at the Arcadia Wildlife Sanctuary in Easthampton. Arcadia has nearly 800 acres of mixed terrain - riverfront, vast meadows, forest, floodplain, swamp. (Note: you can click on the pictures and they will open much larger on a new page.)

As you can see, the river still has ice and the ground was frozen. When it thaws, it's very muddy.

We like going there at all times of year to see the river rise and ebb and to look for birds.

We saw Canadian geese in the water and in the air, crows, red winged blackbirds, ducks and bluebirds. Red winged blackbirds are a sure sign of spring. You usually hear them before you see them.

We could hear the ice cracking as we walked past. The air was just starting to warm up and the sun was pretty strong.

The trees are beginning to bud. The sky was cloudless.

This is a great place for walking, looking, feeling the open space.

We didn't see another person and we were out there for nearly an hour.

It was a nice start to the day.

I took only a few pictures before the camera battery ran out.

New Work - Deconstructed Books

A few years ago when we lived in Ashfield, Mass. (one of the hilltowns of Franklin County in western Massachusetts), we helped our neighbors in the Spruce Corner area of Ashfield clean up and paint an old one-room schoolhouse. It had been unused as a schoolhouse for many years, but at one time had been a neighborhood meeting room for various functions. We came across a stash of old, dirty, mildewed books published between 1915 and 1945 or so that had been left there in an unused part of the building (the privy). We were about to throw them out when my partner Bonnie insisted that we save them and take them home. (She does this with animals, too.)

The books have been traveling with me from studio to studio, and I look at them every now and then, always meaning to use them in my work since they are so evocative of a different era. They are mostly novels and stories suitable for children or young adults. What attracts me to them is not really their content, but their physical appearance.

"Dancers in Mourning", deconstructed book mounted on panel with encaustic, rubber, tacks, pigment stick, 16"H x 12"W. (The title of the piece is the title of the book.)

I have been thinking about the disappearance of memory and the parallels between books without content and people without memory. What are we without our memories? Both people and books have a resonance from their previous life and a certain beauty that reflects the passage of time. I guess this wearing away by time relates to the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi where "an object or expression can bring about, within us, a sense of serene melancholy and a spiritual longing." (Juniper, Andrew (2003). Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence. Tuttle Publishing, quoted on Wikipedia).

The Clue of the Eyelash,  deconstructed book mounted on panel with encaustic, rubber, tacks, pigment stick, 16"H x 12"W.

This is not to minimize the really disastrous impact of memory loss on an individual that leads to the dissolution of a person's mind. I'm choosing to focus on the part of a person that is left when memory starts to go. There is a certain peace that arrives with loss of detail and a lessening importance of those things which preoccupy us so much, mostly relating to time and relationships. In wabi-sabi "nothing lasts, nothing is finished and nothing is perfect" (Powell, Richard R. (2004). Wabi Sabi Simple. Adams Media quoted on Wikipedia).

Boys of Liberty, deconstructed book mounted on panel with encaustic, rubber, tacks, pigment stick, 16"H x 12"W.

So these pieces are made in the spirit of wabi-sabi in recognition of their imperfection, impermanence and changed nature.

As a former English major, I was reminded of my favorite Wordsworth poem, where he describes the sense of serene melancholy and spiritual longing of wabi-sabi.

And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
      With many recognitions dim and faint,
      And somewhat of a sad perplexity,                               
      The picture of the mind revives again:
      While here I stand, not only with the sense
      Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
      That in this moment there is life and food
      For future years. And so I dare to hope,
      Though changed, no doubt, from what I was...

William Wordsworth

Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, 1798

Close to Heaven

Binnie and I trudged down 20th street in Chelsea with snow blowing in our faces, climbed huge snow piles and picked our way through deep puddles of slush. The streets were deserted, few pedestrians and almost no cars. We arrived at the gallery after what seemed a long trek and pushed open the glass door, bringing with us a snowy gust. There along one whole, long wall was the gleaming gold, red and black splendor of El Anatsui's work. Wow!

View as you walk into the gallery. This piece is called "Intermittent Signals", aluminum and copper wire, 132" x 420", 2009.


El Anatsui (all Anatsui, all the time)
Jack Shainman Gallery, February 11 - March 13, 2010
(Note: You can click on any of these pictures and they will open larger on a new page.)

Full view of "Intermittent Signals." Its size is so great that it envelops you when you stand in front of it. (photo from the gallery website)

The work of El Anatsui is certainly no stranger to this blog, but this is the first time I have seen it in person. No matter how many times I saw distant views or closeups in photographs or read descriptions about it, the materiality of his work was so striking to me when I stood in front of it.

Closeup showing the diversity of color that adds to the work's shimmering quality.

When you look at it closely, you see the flimsy individual pieces of aluminum that have been cut, pierced, folded, crushed or twisted and then wired together into a somewhat fragile-looking metallic fabric. This stuff rips pretty easily but  has been worked in many inventive ways to make the most of its shape and color. Sometimes you see the front of the aluminum wrapping, sometimes the back, sometimes a corner is folded down to show another color from the other side. Some pieces are cut at the corners like the ones in the image above.

The red rectangles on the right of this image have their corners folded up to expose a little bit of the silver back. Just look at the striking array of stripes, solids and various textures in the red section. The silver circles have been cut from bottle wrappings. The yellow and red circles at the left are bottle tops that have either been pounded flat or had their edges folded under. This diversity of color and shape was a revelation to me, and all I could think of was my previous experience with mosaic where choosing tiles or stones in a range of color makes the work infinitely more interesting than just having them all be the same. Surely this must also apply to painting where odd strokes of color in a monochromatic field would make the work come alive. I could only think to myself, "Duh!"


My Favorite

Here is another of the galleries, and the silver piece on the right was my favorite of all the work. (Of course I don't have its name or size.) (Another photo from the gallery website.)

This is a better view of it. (Photo courtesy of Sue Katz.)

What a fabulous, shimmery silver it was next to the bits of gold and red. It was like silver lame' or sequins.

The whole piece was mostly made from circles, and their size and variety in addition to the natural reflective quality of the aluminum were what made the work shimmer visually, even without actual movement.

Construction Notes

Look at how many connective wires there are in each of these circles - sometimes five or six - and who could estimate how many circles there are in this whole work? Each of the connections has a certain number of twists in the wire, maybe six or eight? This requires a tremendous amount of labor. In the book about El Anatsui published by Jack Shainman gallery, the names of 47 studio assistants are listed along with a secretary and a studio manager. It takes a virtual army of people to accomplish the tedious assembly of pieces.

Is this "women's work" compared to the "manly work" of Leonardo Drew? Answer: not in Africa and in many other parts of the world. Men are the weavers, dyers, tailors, and textile workers. There is nothing womanly about it and why should Americans think in gender-specific terms about work anyway, unless it's wet nursing? Making these vast metallic cloths is a different kind of labor, not involving brute strength or power tools, that can occur quietly, when seated. (By the way, I notice that all the studio assistants pictured in the El Anatsui book are young men - probably El Anatsui's students.)

Binnie and I were noticing the way in which the work is mounted on the wall. At the top there is a rod and there must be some kind of pocket that the work is threaded on to. Then to make the draped folds, drywall screws are drilled into the wall and the piece hooked onto them - such a simple method. I did notice that the screws had been painted to approximate the color of the aluminum pieces around them.

Creative Hanging Ability

I thought the folds that the gallery put into the works were very lovely. The info sheet that they gave out says that El Anatsui is happy to have galleries and museums make up their own folds, but he does prefer horizontal folds or ripples to vertical ones. Apparently some curators find that this freedom to display the work as they wish is contrary to their training and mind-set. El Anatsui is no Sol Lewitt: he gives no instructions. "Museum people are trained not to be creative," Anatsui says (according to the gallery's handout). "I find that very frustrating."

I can testify to the lack of creativity at one museum: the piece of El Anatsui's ("Between Earth and Heaven") that the Met has on display in the African textiles exhibit is hung on a wall painted a gold color that absolutely sucks the life out of the work. Whoever came up with that color lacks an understanding of color relationships (and a sensitive imagination).

Shadows

Although I had read references to the shadow patterns that the work casts, I had not seen them in photos. But you can see through to the wall when you stand in front of a work, and if there is much space between the piece and the wall, you see the shadows the patterns make, sort of a filligree of shadows.

A beautiful effect that adds to the work's volumetric feel.


Preciousness

I have written before about the relationship of El Anatsui's work to traditional African weaving patterns and methods as well as to ceremonial robes and textiles. Seeing these vast, golden cloths in person reminded me of the post I had written comparing his work to the golden Byzantine mosaics I've seen in Italy. In person El Anatsui's work looks both precious and trashy (don't strike me dead). You stand away from it and it's precious; you go up close and it's trash (fascinating but trash). This makes for a very contemporary use of  cast-off materials, but is a utilitarian practice not new to African art or to El Anatsui apparently.

In the Anatsui book, there are photos (which I'd love to show you) of bags full of collected bottle caps and wrappings waiting to be recuperated into art. (I like that word "recuperated" which comes from the essay about El Anatsui by Elizabeth Harney.) The works in progress are spread out on the floor of the studio and assistants sit on low stools, boards or the floor itself to assemble the pieces. They also walk and sit on the works in progress since the whole floor is covered by them. In El Anatsui's studio, the work is not precious, and I find this to be true in most artists' studios, including my own. The question of  just when art takes on the quality of preciousness is something to ponder.

While I was ordering my book, we happened to look at the price list for the show. The works were very expensive - several of them over a million dollars each - and four or five of the million-plus titles had red dots beside them. Binnie asked the gallery assistant if they had been bought by museums or private collectors and was told that the purchasers were private collectors. This shocked us when we thought not only of the enormous prices but also of the size of the walls needed to show the work.

What must it be like for El Anatsui at the age of 66 to strike it rich big time after a life of teaching, making art, building his resume and then one day he finds a trashbag of aluminum bottle wrappings and WHAMMO, he's an art star! Of course that's not quite how it all happened, but now he can afford 47 assistants if he needs them and be welcomed around the world as a master. He must feel close to heaven.

Addendum

"Transit", 2002, by El Anatsui, size unknown. Constructed from 15 separate pieces of wood carved into patterns with power tools and colored with "colorants taken from his environment", according to the University's website. This image is also from their website.

I just came across this image through a post on Venetian Red about mudcloth. The VR post led me to the University of Iowa Museum which collected this work by El Anatsui. Interesting to see how this work, so closely related to Kente cloth, evolved into the current metal works. The website quotes Anatsui's comment about materials:  "Art grows out of each particular situation and I believe that artists are better off working with whatever the environment throws up. I think that has been happening in Africa for a long time…"

Out in the World

Where to begin? My trip to New York was packed with so many things. The fact that my friend Binnie Birstein and I made it into the city at all in the midst of that strange and unending snowstorm was tale enough by itself. But that the galleries showing my Two Faves were open when so many around them were closed, was truly a miracle, fate, coincidence or a beneficence from the Goddess of Happiness.

Leonardo Drew (yes, again)
Exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., January 30 - March 6, 2010.
(Note: you can click on any of these images and they will open much larger on another page.)

Here I am, looking like the world's happiest geek-in-black, in front of a piece by Leonardo Drew.

Two of the things I discovered on this trip: (1) If you're going to blog about it, get the work's title when you take the picture. (2) Never have your own picture taken - especially in front of an artwork.

So, because of #1, I am not able to give you the title of this work but because of #2, you get an idea of the scale.

This is the way the piece looks from the side. The bottom part is strand board, I think, a type of plywood that he has worked with a tool or chisel to dig into the wood and gouge out sections. The top is both milled lumber and branches - all painted.

This is a detail of the upper right corner. It looks like studio floor sweepings with very carefully placed little thin pieces of wood - a mixture of discard, salvage and transformation.

In visiting Drew and El Anatsui, I also became more aware of the difference in the way individuals view and photograph artists' work. These two shows have been well documented by professional reviewers and bloggers. One of the foremost art bloggers is Joanne Mattera, of course, and I previously saw her photos and those taken by my friend Sue Katz. When I photographed these two artists myself, my own concentration seemed to be very different from theirs. Of course I had the benefit of already seeing and being influenced by their photos, so my eye wasn't entirely innocent.

The piece of Drew's that I liked best was not one I had seen in photos previously, so I guess that means it was not everyone's favorite.

Drew titles his works with numbers rather than names, but since I don't know the number, I'm referring to this one, my favorite, as Black Swath. I thought it looked like a brushstroke of black paint across the whole piece, and I loved the movement it added to the grid. In the same segmented way that I believe Drew constructs all his work, this piece is composed of 24" x 24" panels, and there are 5 panels across and 5 panels down, making it 10 feet x 10 feet.

Here is a detail taken more from the side showing the tightly-packed pieces of lumber that comprise the black swath.

And here is Binnie standing in front of it to give you the scale.

I guess I related more to the "smaller" works instead of the massive fill-up-the-gallery black piece that you see when you first enter. I didn't get a full picture of that piece, just a corner that I could see from the next gallery.

I found this piece a bit scary because of its size and protrusions and its location. Because the gallery was so narrow, it was impossible to get back enough from it to really view the piece, so you ended up just walking past it to get to the rest of the gallery spaces. This work should be in a much deeper space to be seen as a whole instead of just in slices.

Another of the smaller pieces that I liked was one composed of shallow boxes constructed from what looked like old window framing. It was very reminiscent of later Nevelson, as Joanne Mattera (there I am, dropping her name again) noted in her blog post that pondered whether Drew was the love child of Louise N. and Anselm Kiefer.

So here it is - a Nevelson-ish piece that is maybe six feet by six feet and only a couple of inches deep.

Here is a detail showing the surface of one of the boxes with some pencil drawing under the black-painted branch. The color is a grayed white with an aged, salvaged look.

Here's another box that looks particularly like Nevelson's work.

But no matter how much Drew might be influenced by Nevelson as a predecessor, he remains his own man - and "man" is very much what I thought of in viewing this show because of the physical work and strength required to create it. So much manly labor was invested to carry out these ideas. (Of course manly labor is not strictly the province of men - look at Ursula Von Rydingsvard for a counter example.)

Now about ideas, I know that Drew's work is about regeneration from the time-worn, discarded and decaying elements of the constructed world. His is very much an urban world with nature intruding sometimes on the human elements. I think that this show is probably less about decay since less rust is used than Drew has included in the past, but I didn't see the really urban portrayal until I looked at my photos from the show.

This is one of Drew's pieces shot from below. You can see the shadows at the bottom of the image. But how much like the densely-packed city it is!

If these pieces were on the floor, they would be a diorama of New York.

When they are shifted up to the wall, they still retain this feeling but are less obviously a portrayal.

So my first eyes-on viewing of Leonardo Drew's work provided lots of discoveries. There is nothing like coming face to face with real live art. No matter how many written descriptions, photos, podcasts or videos you may read or see, you will never know a work of art until you come in close contact with it. Moral: virtual reality is not real reality and I have to get out more.

Love in a Tiny Package

Wow, the excitement! My new teeny, tiny, little camera is so adorably cute that I am blown away by the huge, brilliant photos it takes - plus it's so quiet. All these things are something my old digital camera is not or does not do. The difference is phenomenal.

I really haven't had time to play with it, but I was in the studio today packing up my pieces to send to Tucson for the 5th Annual Encaustic Invitational at Conrad Wilde Gallery, and I shot a few photos of the work before it went out the door.

Here is the front of the card for the show - just a little plug.

Anyway, here is Tale of Shadows, encaustic and mixed media on two joined panels, 21" H x 12" W as photographed by my old camera. (By the way, all these shots will open a page for a larger image if you click on them.)

And here it is below as photographed by the new camera:

Amazing, right?

Here are a couple of other shots of this piece.

From the side showing the rubber around the edges.

At an angle showing the front and side.


Now here is the second piece, Redacted Memory, same materials and size as the first. The shot below is from the old camera:

Now here's the same shot from the new camera:

It doesn't even look like the same piece, does it? I actually think the second shot is too light. The first one has a lot more mystery - mainly because you can't quite see anything!

Here is just one more shot of Redacted Memory:

This is just the "book" at the top of the piece with rubber redacting the words from the pages underneath.

All these photos were taken in my studio with just overhead daylight fluorescents and no flash. There was light coming in through the window but it was a very dark day today and late afternoon around 4:00.

This whiz of a camera is the Canon PowerShot SD780 IS. I don't know what all the initials are but you can just call it the 780. This is actually last year's camera, I think, because the new one is the 880. This one is 12.1 mega pixels. My old camera was 5.5 megapixels and cost way more. I got a good deal on this at Best Buy in a package that included the discounted camera, a 4GB memory card, a spare battery and a carrying case - all for $239.95 plus tax. Wow! I paid nearly $900 for my last camera about 4-5 years ago.

I got this camera so I would have it for my trip to New York and could take all those stealth gallery photos. Looks like I better practice up before I start going stealth because I don't know how to use it effectively yet and these photos above were just taken with the nothing special manual setting (rather than with all the auto gadgets that recognize faces, etc.). It's so great to have a tiny new toy! Color me mighty pleased.

Encaustic by the Gallon

Whew! What a lot of work I put into the encaustic class I taught for Smith College this past week! I worked very hard getting ready for the demo and Power Point on Tuesday and then the hands-on class on Thursday, but I think it was worth it. All the students seemed to really enjoy learning about this great medium and its history as well as getting to experiment with it themselves.

It suddenly dawned on me as I was setting up that this was a huge class for teaching encaustic. Somehow when I was buying materials for 12 students, I never thought about that many people all waxing away at once. Actually there were more painters than that because some faculty joined in too.

The details: I made medium from 10 lbs of beeswax plus 2 lbs of damar resin. Then I filled 36 tins with medium and added small pieces of pigmented paint to them for the colors. Each of the four heated palettes (griddles) had six R&F Paint colors (Rose Madder, Azure Blue, Ultramarine Blue, Alizarin Orange, Cadmium Yellow Light, Cadmium Green Light) plus Titanium White and Ivory Black. Each also had a deeper tin of clear medium. Each tin had a 1" brush and the medium also had a 2" brush.

Each of the 12 place settings had a 6"x6" panel and a 6" x 8" panel, with one of the two panels painted with R&F encaustic gesso. Each also had two pottery tools (one for scraping and one for incising) and three 1/2 brushes. There was also a container with 144 smaller brushes and boxes of larger brushes.

I set up two 4'x8' tables, each with three places on each side and two palettes. Heat guns were located at both ends of each table. I also had a separate station with a frying pan of medium and another heat gun. And I had a resource table with xerox copies, texture materials, pigment sticks, an iron, etc., etc. There were also the tops of the paint tins for mixing colors in. I had several uncradled boards, too, that fast workers could use if they covered both their panels.

People dug right in and started their projects. Everyone seemed to have plenty of ideas to keep them busy.

They didn't seem to need much help from me although I walked around and looked "available". I guess this was what I found to be the most difficult part of teaching - the not being needed part. What do teachers do during this part of a class? I really never thought about it before.

The three-hour class passed by pretty quickly until it was time for clean up and review of the work.

It was pretty surprising that the work varied so much from one piece to the next. These students were not artists, by the way, but mostly art history majors. This class is part of the Museum Studies program.

Apparently I missed taking photos of all the students, but I think I will be getting a copy of a short video taken by David Dempsey, teacher of the class.

And here is David Dempsey, conservator and preparator for the Smith College Museum. He developed quite an ambitious program for this course in Materials and Methods of Art, which is being taught for the first time this spring. The course syllabus is pretty amazing and takes students all the way from the manufacture of raw materials of art, through supports and tools, and then into mediums or practices such as encaustic, fresco, tempera and distemper, watercolor, oil, charcoal, relief printing, marbling and gilding. This is a course I wish I could take!

So a fun time was had by all, I learned a great deal by stepping up to this challenge and now I'm glad to get back to my own head and a quiet (and clean) studio.