Drawings and Economic Events

March 16 2010 ink 6"x6"

Woods Inspired By Jake Berthot 12x9 pencil

Woods Across the Street 18x12 colored pencil

Woods and Window 12x18 charcoal on paper

Sunset 9x12 colored pencil

Sunset Snow 12x9 colored pencil

February Trees 12x9 ink

February 12th 12x9 pencil

This is a techi week for me. I set up accounts on Twitter and YouTube:follow Art Weekly on Twitter: Art_WeeklyNM.

My YouTube channel where I uploaded three videos this week is under tofupoweredartchick.

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Three recent events, not all negative, reflect the effects of the economy on the arts:

Art school friends told me the Nielsen Gallery in Boston is closing. There's a post about it on the blog Gregcookland.com. I left a comment. The gallery represents many painters whom I love including Jake Berthot, who I have written about before. Now open by appointment only, I rue not being able to see exhibitions by their artists. Berthot's Untitled (3475), graphite from 2008 shows a mapping of light and form, vectors visible as thin lines structuring the drawing. It is truly amazing and shows an depth of concentrated looking rarely seen in art. Patches of light coming down through leaves and branches are subtly integrated with the rest of the environment. If the number 3475 is the number of untitled pieces he has made, it is a sign of someone who has put in their time.

Dennis Kois, the new director of the Decordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, has gotten the museum into the black, raising one million dollars. At first the decision to return twenty-five sculptures on loan seemed dismaying. I am reassured to learn it un-clutters the thirty-five acre grounds, making it easier to see the work as well as making room for the acquisition of two new works.

This week the Ford Foundation announced it is donating ONE HUNDRED MILLION dollars to renovate art spaces and fund art projects in culturally diverse spaces (see the article in The Huffington Post. YAY!!! I almost couldn't believe it. It is not unlike Providence, RI's commitment to the arts and belief in art's ability to revitalize communities. Art centers, studios, and events bring new residents and foot traffic with businesses such as restaurants and stores not far behind. Providence is called "The Creative Capital".

I hope you enjoy the drawings this week. Drawing is the beginning of many artistic ideas, immediate and direct visual thinking. It can also be an end in itself. It is still important.

Speaking of important art, blogger Amy Cook sent me this:

“100 Awe-Inspiring Artists You Should Follow On Twitter” http://graphicdesigndegrees.org/100-awe-inspiring-artists-you-should-follow-on-twitter/ .

Spring #13,14, & 15

Spring Landscape #15 Lincoln Woods 24" x 18" oil on panel

Spring Landscape #14 Rainy March 27" x 21" oil on canvas

Spring Landscape #13 It Stopped Raining 12" x 12" oil on panel

"Avery is first a great poet. His is the poetry of sheer loveliness, of sheer beauty... This - alone - took great courage in a generation which felt that it could be heard only through clamor, force and a show of power..." - Rothko's eulogy for PAINTER Milton Avery, (appearing in Milton Avery The Late Paintings, by Robert Hobbs 1946, Abrams Inc.).

I can relate to Avery in the way he painted, as a colorist favoring landscape, and the difficulty of being engaged with natural beauty in a tumultuous and increasingly technological world. I see this tension in my new painting, Spring Landscape #15; the branches electrified and pointing to a focal point in one-point perspective. The struggle of art in contemporary life seems to be coming up more and more. In her book Finding Beauty in a Broken World, writer Terry Tempest Williams considers beauty and art and its place in the world. She places art in juxtaposition with the environmental crisis and the Rwandan genocide. She believes art is a way of survival, and so do I.

We've recently recuperated from flooding here in Rhode Island. I had to scramble to bring many of my large paintings up from the basement, packing my dining room and studio. I only got a half-inch of water, nothing like neighboring towns needing evacuation. Numbers thirteen and fourteen came out what seemed like an endless string of rainy days leading up to the flooding of parts of I-95 South. My backyard was squishy and the greens brilliant and mossy. The back story of these paintings involves joyfully finding my imitation Wellies from our recent move, composting in downpours, stir crazy dogs barking and missing walks, and the basement reaching the humidity level of 50%, the ideal for art. All this is real to me just as much as the health care debate and anything else in The New York Times. Like Avery, I am guilty of loving light, color, and loveliness and am not detached.

Ceramics: Night Window/Ocean/Birches/ Western NY Landscape #16-27

all approximately 4" x 5"

ceramic reliefs

A lot of reliefs came out of the kiln and I'm playing catch-up here. My friend, the painter Aaron Brooks, thinks these look surreal. Surreal can mean "dreamlike" or "other-worldly". The artistic movement of Surrealism was begun in 1924 by Andre Breton and most people are familiar with Salvador Dali's Persistence of Memory which is wide spread in poster form. If you ever go to see it at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City you may be surprised at how small it is (9 1/2" x 13"). I agree with Brooks but I find they have qualities that are difficult to ascertain. [Please excuse the format with all of them up against each other but I couldn't find another way in Blogger. It makes them hard to see.]

I love the color quality I'm able to get using a combination of glazes and under glaze pastels. The glassiness is sparkly like a varnished painting. The imagery is abstracted from nature, varying in degrees. I continue dot play in some, consider texture, and really try to push space both physically in shaping the clay and in the illusionistic painting of it. Most tiles are surface decoration but these approach three-dimensional painting. I'm not interested in the same things as the artist Frank Stella, however, who had a 2007 show at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in NYC titled "Painting into Architecture". Stella and Maya Lin (designer of the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial) received the National Medal of Arts in February presented by President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama at the White House. Artinfo.com says that previous painters who've received the award include Georgia O'Keefe, Jacob Lawrence, Jasper Johns, and Robert Motherwell. I particularly like Lin's piece Wakefield created at the outdoor sculpture center Storm King (near the Hudson in New York State) in 2009 with its small rolling hills relating to the hills of the surrounding landscape. One could say it has surreal qualities. I think my work, although of modest scale and not an on-site earth work, has a connection to it in that way. The mystery of what art is actually doing is the hook that draws us back. I am so glad the United States formally recognizes its importance and acknowledges the contributions of some of its creators.

Winter Landscapes #15 (Smooth in Blue and White) and #17 (Hazy Sky and Snow)

12" x 12" oil on panel

Now that it's officially spring I have to get caught up on posting my winter paintings; these are the last this year.

Smooth in Blue and White reminds me a bit of Georgia O'Keefe and the paintings she did of adobe buildings in New Mexico with their soft, flowing, yet rectilinear forms. She is an example of an artist who painted both abstractly and representationally , like myself. She said, "I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for." Those "things" are why painters paint rather than choose a different medium. Arthur Dove, a contemporary (and another fave of mine) painted similar forms.

Hazy Sky and Snow has a sun smack in the middle and towards the top of my composition. The sky and land bisect the square. Light colors shimmer like winter light. The arrangement reminds me of the painter Adolph Gottlieb, famous for his abstract paintings often having the particular structure of a vertical format with a circle painted at the top half and a jagged shape on the bottom. The two forms set in opposition stimulate metaphors in the viewer. I especially love his Rolling, 1961, with its landscape format, nice and bold calligraphic black line at the bottom, and two large circles in colors I love together: red and blue. He makes use of the color of the canvas like Chinese landscape painters use the white of the paper, something I enjoy as well.

My spring series will continue shortly...

Winter Landscape #14 The Neighbor's House & #16 My New Neighborhood

both are 12"x12" oil on panel

When I think about these paintings I can make fun of myself, hearing Weird Al Yankovic's latest song, White and Nerdy (the resemblance to certain loved ones is hilarious) or the theme song to the kids movie Over the Hedge, Rockin' the Suburbs by Ben Folds.

I hesitated to post these. I'm living in the suburbs of Rhode Island, back to the suburbs (song) like where I grew up in Massachusetts, no longer the countryside in Western New York State. The subject is pedestrian; the suburbs are planned. I didn't want it to seem like the strange, artificial neighborhood in one of my favorite childhood books, A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L'Engle. Everything is the same in that neighborhood and it's really creepy. Magritte's Empire of Lights is eerie with its blue sky and clouds but town in darkness.

I don't want the pictures to look like so many dead paintings done by amateurs. This kind of landscape is done to death like roses and it's hard to escape the cliches. I think I overcame them in my series of roses and I hope I did here. I'm happy with the way the trees came out and there is an overall joyous feel. People may see the familiar subject and feel comforted, something they can relate to, something pleasant. That's fine but it can also annoy me because they may miss the point just as much as they may find an abstraction illegible, undecipherable. Or the joie de vie will come across and the viewer will perceive the whole thing without additional knowledge like how I intuit a lot of classical music without being a musician. Appreciation can be just as deep because the art speaks to humanity not just the trained and educated.

I'm getting acquainted with my new home, orienting myself and using art as one way to do it. Many artists worked to capture the every day: Vuillard, Chardin, Vermeer, the photographer Nan Goldin and photography as a medium in general. The painter and art critic Fairfield Porter painted similar subjects to this and I love is work; it's so fresh. Who is to say that what superficially seems mundane can't be extraordinary? So much occurs within the routine. We study the every day lives of past cultures to find out what made them unique and how they are similar or dissimilar to us. And we always look at their art.

Maybe there are people in these houses who are hooked on the game Farmville on Facebook. There's a good chance because there are over eleven million daily users. This isn't a typo. The draw in pretending to be farmers may relate to the new trend of consciousness about where food comes from and the environmental and fiscal advantages of buying local. Maybe the the bucolic life is fantasy enough for suburbanites and city dwellers. I think the peaceful feeling I'm painting is like that. I don't play Farmville because painting is so fascinating but kudos to you if you do.

Winter Landscapes #12 and #13

Winter Landscape #12, Stone Wall Upper & Lower, 12" x 9" oil on panel

Winter Landscape #13, Dusk, 9" x 12" oil on panel

The movie Julie and Julia is every struggling creative person's fantasy. A true story, writer, Julie Powell, is frustrated and bored in her day job is inspired by another artist, Julia Child.

["Some people like to paint pictures, or do gardening, or build a boat in the basement. Other people get a tremendous pleasure out of the kitchen, because cooking is just as creative and imaginative an activity as drawing, or wood carving, or music." -Julia Child]

Combining her love of cooking and writing, she gives herself a monumental task with a deadline: to make every recipe in Julia Child's cookbook in 365 days, blogging about it on the way. It isn't easy, sometimes stressful, sometimes fun, but Julie succeeds in immersing herself in the process and gains literary attention (not to mention a major motion picture). I heard a writer on the radio tell about a strategy another writer recommended him: to write your life story in one hour a day at the same time for twelve days. Artists can find the structure and discipline such strategies can offer. Similar art school problems I heard from more than one teacher is to "make a hundred of them", "work on it for thirty-six hours", "draw the negative of it", or to paint on a deck of cards. The result would flush out problems in the work, probably resolve many, and provide focus. Painter On Kawara is known for his series of "date paintings" numbering over two thousand. Working in a series follows suit, like I am doing in my series of the seasons.

Winter Landscape #12, Stone Wall Upper and Lower, gets its title because my house has a beautiful stone wall around it. As a little girl, a thirty minute or so drive with my grandfather to visit my aunt in Ipswich, MA seemed like a long. Before the days of dsi's or even tapes of kids music, we had a lot of time on our hands. He came up with a game of counting all the stone walls and white fences we saw; simple, it delighted me. The center band of gray here has dots that don't really construct it but bubble up, pointing in perspective to the grass and sky above. The blue shadow has a different vanishing point off to the right. The painting is made of bands, the gray window edges, the upper left of which isn't fully covered with paint but dryly gone over allowing the white of the panel to show through and make light. The sky has blended bands of blue and of course there is the snow. It is called "Upper and Lower" because the wall is the middle line between the bottom and the top. The top could almost be spring and so in this way it is like an earlier painting of mine, Winter on the Left, Spring on the Right.

Winter Landscape #13, Dusk uses the white window edge to accentuate the blue of the snow, sky, and blue cast to the brown trees outside. It is quite stunning to look out and see that glow at the end of the day. I love to exclaim to my son, "Look, it's blue out!" trying to pass on that painter's knowledge that white isn't always white. Your assignment for the week, painter or not: look at the white walls of a room and see the color changes created by light. Notice warm vs. cool, bright vs. dark, blue/purple vs. yellow. If you get good you'll notice other colors, too. Take a break from texting and look : )

Thaw #2

18 x 24 oil on panel

Whites of melting snow give away to green grass. The top center is a focal point, a restful blue-gray sky. The painting is similar to my abstractions done in 1998 and exhibited at Villanova University. Light lines form a frame, an artificial spatial point that takes the painting into a metaphorical realm, a platonic conception of thawing winter. Matisse did it with chairs, for example. Rather than a rendering of a chair, his depictions are the idea of chairs, re situated in artificial, fantastical rooms partially observed, partially imagined. On a grimmer note, Andy Warhol's electric chairs' repetitiveness produced via silkscreen are also about the concept of an electric chair and all the ethical questions tied to it. Presenting any picture, photograph, painting, whatever, of an electric chair comes with the baggage of the moral debate over capital punishment. Art works this way, inevitably symbolic. Portraits can be seen as emblematic of the human condition despite the specificity of a particular person in time through the eyes of a particular artist, likewise for Christian art. Rodin and Camille Claudel's figurative sculptures are great examples. Airy and cold, Thaw #2 is my experience and concept of winter.