Seek ATL, studio visit with artist Nancy VanDevender

Posted on May 25, 2012 by Victoria

This past Saturday was jam packed with artists’ talks, a panel discussion on painting in the morning (more on that in the next post), and another Seek ATL studio visit and dialogue with artist Nancy VanDevender, who has a space over at Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (ACAC). She teaches at Clark University.

VanDevender uses video, photography, pattern and typography and in this new work, she’s drawing. She is also interested in space and installation, what she calls sets and salons. Large scale color photographs include women with intricate tatoos; the body as subject. She has created Victoriana and heraldic patterned wallpaper with African American women’s faces cut and pasted into it, with historical references that include the Civil Rights movement. Her take on feminism and ritual has juxtaposed young African American women posed in bathing suits before a backdrop wallpaper of ruffles and maps.

In her current work in progress, she is appropriating and layering frames from three films; the always fascinating Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad, Lars Van Triers’ Dogville and Hong Kong based Wong Kar-Wai’s retro and beautifully dysfunctional In the Mood for Love. This series is still being worked on, but VanDevender suggests that she wants to lead the viewer into the idea of game playing and show the alienation that can occur through the formation of cliques.

To take one film example, Marienbad  deals with memory and the loss of continuity over time. The film’s baroque hotel set and formal gardens are obvious in the patterns that VanDevender works into her layered assemblages. Self-trickery in this film is not so much a game but a question. What is reality, what is memory but a series of constructs?

The Seek group, including ACAC’s Stuart Horodner at this visit, discussed how the artist’s intent might be further elaborated. The complexity of the layering and perspective created by patterned repetition is what makes these tableaus so interesting. The artist’s main focus seems to be people; how they relate to each other, their roles in society, and race and gender issues.

That mystery is a feature of all three of the films seems to carry over as an element into VanDevender’s work. Like Resnais, she does not want to so much portray a linear narrative, as to look at an entire scene at once and highlight the reference points of the filmic ‘armature’. She says her interest is in how people meet, and the circumstances in which some random meetings take place.

 

Nancy’s statement on her site notes that “she is an installation artist who uses space as a platform for mixing politics, theatre, and design. Through a sculptural practice, physical ornamentation and digital illusion are handled as both flattened historical venue and projected politicized stage.  The collection, alteration, and arrangement of tattoos provide interior displays of presumed relationships and shared cultures.”

VanDevender’s new work prompts a rumination on figurative art and mark-making. What is the signatory pattern to these pieces? The combination of  iconography that she mines results in dense overlapped perspectives. Are the patterns a decorative ruse meant to confound, which then become an analogy for the way that the participants in the films struggle to meet and interact?

David Cope, a UC Santa Cruz Professor Emeritus of Music embarked on a project when he suffered from composer’s block. He used a computer scientist’s help to develop a program that could reveal musical patterns; the DNA of the composer’s ‘mark-making’. In his words:

“Recombinancy can be defined simply as a method for producing new music by recombining extant music into new logical successions…recombinancy appears everywhere as a natural evolutionary and creative process. All the great books in the English language, for example, are constructed from recombinations of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet.

Similarly, most of the great works of Western art music exist as recombinations of the twelve pitches of the equal-tempered scale and their octave equivalents. The secret lies not in the invention of new letters or notes but in the subtlety and elegance of their recombination.”

In these appropriated frames, the artist recombines icons and symbolism to explore gender roles, isolation and relationships. We look forward to seeing the elegance of her results.

Thanks again to Shara and Ben from Seek ATL for organizing these studio visits for local artists, in which to engage, connect and discuss.

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Decatur Garden Tour

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Victoria

I volunteered a few hours of my time at the Decatur Garden Tour last weekend, specifically at a garden with pool and beautifully cared for antique roses. Pat Maddux, owner and gracious hostess, spent the entire shift with us volunteers. While we sat on her patio and drank iced tea, she pointed visitors to the goldfish pond and the sparkling salt-water pool. Not a bad trade for tickets to the tour.

Private enough for skinny-dipping on hot summer nights…what bliss!

 

Pat told us about AW Pottery as a source for garden urns and pots, and Elizabeth Dean’s Wilkerson Mill for hydrangeas. I may have to drive down for a visit later this month.

David Austin roses scent the front yard and other varieties border the pool.

She has Ligustrum, Tea Olives (osmanthus fragrans) and Arborvitae Green Giant in her foundation plantings.

Original wood models for papier-maché bunnies.

The next day I visited three gardens. This first one on Adams Street owned by Patty and Ed Buckley, had a tiny formal herb garden, great seating arrangements and  lovely perennial borders scattered with sculptural elements.

 

The Daiga Dunis and Kim Wallen garden was also on Adams Street and featured a pond and old stone garage converted to artist’s studio.

An idyllic backyard for reading, listening to birds and sketching. Cool and serene.

 

Ryan Gainey’s magical enclave was next. If you’ve never visited his garden, please go on Decatur’s fall garden tour. And try to meet him. He is a marvel of knowledge about plants and flowers. I went to his late afternoon talk on antique roses and how to use them in the garden. To answer a question about whether his roses liked being intertwined with moonvine, clematis and jasmine, he whispered, ‘they are lovers’. Atlanta’s poet of nature.

The irony  is not lost on Gainey that the Cherokee Rose is Georgia’s state flower, while the state drove the entire Cherokee tribe out of the territory from the early to late 1800s. He pointedly asks us if we know the rose’s history. His own great great grandmother was a full blooded Cherokee. Watch him talk about the mythology of the rose in this video.

Some of his other suggestions include using the 1930 climber, New Dawn with clematis and confederate jasmine.

A charming guest cottage in the back of the property.

A spiral staircase up to the tree-house.

Greenhouse with goddess sculpture.

A special Eden.

Manicured boxwoods.

Gainey reading from Peter Coates’ hard to find 1970 book, Flowers in History. Another recommended book is A Rose by Any Other Name by Douglas Brenner and Stephen Scanniello. Gainey says he never sprays his roses, not even for black spot or powdery mildew. He chooses hardy varieties and plants only those that bloom once a season. He gets 1 gallon plants from two favored growers; Pat Henry of Roses Unlimited (“she has a passion for roses”), who grows them on their own rootstock, and the Antique Rose Emporium in Texas.

Finally, a wonderful video on the Southern Spaces site about figs with Gainey’s narration, produced by Steve Bransford.

Excerpt from Bransford’s essay:

This video short is one of several satellite pieces connected to their comprehensive film about Gainey, which fuses biography and botanical discourse. Born in the 1940s, Gainey grew up poor and gay in rural South Carolina and attended Clemson University, where he studied ornamental horticulture. Using vernacular plants in classical garden design, he became a successful landscaper in the 1980s. He is renowned for pairing English garden aesthetics with native plants of the southeastern United States.

As is evident in the introduction of this short video, Gainey’s gardens become fields of memory. He participates in seed saving movements that value heirloom plants, both botanically and culturally. He sees plants as part of larger historical narratives, whether they are species grown by Benjamin Franklin or Gainey’s own grandmother. Gainey’s musings on figs (using scientific Latinate terms and discussing Western mythology) demonstrate his devotion to gardening as botany and cultural study.

“Fields of memory”, I may steal that phrase for a painting…

 

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The Kress Project, Georgia Museum of Art

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Victoria

I am honored to be awarded inclusion in the Georgia Museum of Art’s Kress Project this year. A panel chose 24 artists out of those who gave responses to one of the Renaissance paintings in the museum’s collection, and whose work will be published in the book.

It’s wonderful that this award includes an honoraria and I keep the painting.

Fifty years ago, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation gave a small collection of Italian Renaissance paintings to the Georgia Museum of Art as part of the foundation’s efforts to make great works of art available to the general public in museums throughout the United States. Now, in celebration of that anniversary and to further the foundation’s mission to promote interaction with great works of art, the Georgia Museum of Art announces the Kress Project.

Below is the painting, my statement with Antonio Cicognara’s painting and here is the link to their site.

Oil on canvas, 27 x 46 inches, 2011
Description
This painting abstracts a view from my studio of what was once heavily wooded landscape. New development now offers a swath of orange safety fencing, wrenched tree roots and men who work on bulldozers all day long. They are working to eliminate the natural beauty of land, while preparing it for single family housing.

“Christ, Man of Sorrows” depicts a rocky and harsh landscape, relatively empty with one lone walled town in the distance. At the time, not only were Renaissance painters imbuing landscape with a new naturalism, but symbolism became more important. As Barbara Lynn-Davis suggests in her book “Landscapes of Imagination” (1988, Princeton University Press), the landscape of the Italian Renaissance became a rarefied object. Contrasts between urban and rural environments were commonly depicted, as we see in this particular work. Christ sits in a naturalistic setting, while the city lies behind him.

The sentiment in the painting echoes my own sorrow towards the land’s demise. In the painting, Christ is depicted as a man for whom the world is a grim reminder of man’s sinfulness. The landscape is not his main concern, but in our own culture the same attitude of “forbearance” to the possible extinction of species and the rape of land by industrialists or in the name of progress, can be aligned with Christ’s towards the sinners who beat him for preaching peace, justice and equality.

I try to portray the moment between the landscape as it lives in nature and at the point of man’s destruction – or transformation – of it. The light is the one constant that we painters can at least for now, depend on.

ARTIST STATEMENT

The spell of nature and our dependence on environment is at the root of my work. The act of painting is often ecstatic, taking me beyond ordinary observation. I see colors while listening to music; heightened chroma combines with the primal force of place that informs my work. Sourcing the history of expressionism, I voice the song of dualities: emotion and formalism.

 Antonio Cicognara (Ferrarese, active ca. 1480–1500)
Christ, Man of Sorrows, ca. 1500
Tempera on wood
11 3/8 x 8 1/4 inches
Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia; The Samuel H. Kress Study Collection
GMOA 1961.1889

 

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Death as mystery

Posted on April 14, 2012 by Victoria

I know, no one wants to hear about death, dying, illness or misery.  My maternal grandfather once said, à la Yogi Berra, ‘if you live long enough, you will get old’. 

What do we talk about when we talk about death? Not much, it turns out. We skitter around what has become a toxic subject in the west, like scaredy-cats. We lose parents and friends and still, most of us avoid the issue  in conversation. Sadly, it’s true that once a certain age is reached, we begin losing more and more friends and relatives to either old age or illness.

The late psychologist and suicide researcher Edwin Shneidman echoed my grandfather by stating that “Dying is the one thing – perhaps the only thing – in life that you don’t have to do. Stick around long enough and it will be done for you.”

A pioneer in the holistic health movement, UCSF’s Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen puts it a little differently, “death is a mystery worth contemplating.”  Talk therapy can help sort out our feelings and sadness. So can any transformative effort like painting, music or literature. I’ve been working on a couple of paintings for the last few months that directly reference a potential personal loss; a friend has been valiantly battling advanced cancer for over a year.

My newest work doesn’t portray her visage in any realistic way, it’s an homage to her in absentia. The memory of her friendship, possibly what might be called her aura, is what I hope to evince and more than that, use as a kind of healing acceptance. I have no illusions about death being an adventure into a new and fabulous world. It may end up being nothing more than a ‘big black hole’ – as my mother used to maintain after she’d had it with all forms of religion.

Baby Blues. Oil on canvas 24″ x 24″, 2012.

But that’s not really the point. In Schneidman’s book, Death: Current Perspectives, he says that “a person’s death is not only an ending, it is also a beginning – for the survivors.”

How we accept and deal with loss in our everyday lives is often based on our culture. I took a trip to Bali in the late 1990’s, specifically  to witness a cultural phenomenon like none other in the world; almost everyone there is an artist or artisan. Their culture supports and rewards the act of creating and the end result. And their unique belief system, a blend of Hindu, Buddhist and animism, does not so much mourn death as celebrate it.

Ok, it helps if you think that you might be reincarnated into an industrious ant or a magnificent bird. The soul is released from the body and freed from all material aspects of worldly life. Could the journey be just one step closer to that white light that some of us witnessed in certain drug induced states?

Elegy/Thunderbolt of You. Oil on canvas 46″ x 27″, 2012. (work in progress)

What I’ve returned to for comfort in years of experiencing loss, whether it was the end of a relationship or more profound loss, is poetry. The poet Tess Gallagher, once married to author Raymond Carver and who has been writing and teaching poetry since the mid 1970’s, wrote a volume called Moon Crossing Bridge, a few years after Carver’s death in 1988. That collection of luminous writings, centered on loss and grieving, has been my mainstay for the past couple of decades. It has shown me that transcendence and healing can come through experiencing a work of art.

Moon Crossing Bridge

If I stand a long time by the river

when the moon is high

don’t mistake my attention

for the merely aesthetic, though

that saves in daylight.

Only what we once called worship

has feet light enough to carry

the living on that span of brightness.

And who’s to say I didn’t cross

just because I used the bridge in its witnessing,

to let the water stay the water

and the incongruities of the moon to chart

that joining I was certain of.

 

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Seek ATL, studio visit with painter Shara Hughes

Posted on March 25, 2012 by Victoria

The second monthly studio visit I attended with Seek ATL as host, was to Shara Hughes’ third floor Telephone Factory space. She showed several paintings that will be in an upcoming exhibit this fall. This visit, coordinated again by artists Ben Steele and Hughes, included more local artists in attendance, some of whom I’d met at Marc Brotherton’s studio in early February.

Hughes moved back to Atlanta from New York about three years ago and has settled into her light filled studio with Chicken Nugget, her Boston Terrier.

The group launched into its usual routine of asking questions about the work and offering comments, always constructive, sometimes challenging. Hughes’ current work consists of medium to large sized paintings of interiors, packed with patterns and skewed perspectives; sofas, windows, chairs, altered or disjointed figures and spray painted slashes.

Some of Hughes’ influences are obvious in her paintings; Hockney and Matisse. The latter she calls her hero, and her sense of color and high chroma contrasts what may be darker subject matter in some of the work. Joan Mitchell was an early influence when Hughes experimented with more gestural abstractions.

I wondered about one painting. Like Francis Bacon’s central figures that appear to be trapped in a psychological battle that only the painter can elucidate, in one of Hughes’ more centrally focused figurative works, a defined head is missing, but the body’s pose in the chair was remarkable, not least for the uncomfortable sensation it produced in this viewer.

She talked about initially coming up with titles, and then proceeds from that starting point. Her intent is not to be necessarily narrative in a literal sense, at the same time surrealism and cubism seem obvious infiltrators in her perspective and recent subject matter. Hughes said she didn’t want the viewer to be faced with the responsibility of interpreting subject matter. In her painting process, she consciously attempts to alternate between “speeding up and slowing down”, in an effort at spontaneity.

As a mostly intuitive painter, Hughes says that she doesn’t work from sketches although there were several small paintings on paper tacked to the studio wall. The work may be autobiographical but her intent is to subsume that in the final composition. Her paint can be traditional oil, with the addition of house enamel alongside areas of spray paint and glitter.

An interesting comment was made that in Hughes’ paintings there is the feeling that the viewer is being pushed out of or trapped within the painting via her constructs. Beyond the window in one work lies a dull and dreary winter tree vista. Hughes explained that her concept for that title – “I don’t see like you anymore” had more to do with how others view one’s persona rather than the image one may have of one’s self.

In another painting the hint of a man is shown outside what could be a window frame; his fingers wrapped around a door, or his eyes peering between the leaves of a plant – and lends an ominous feel to the work. The title of the piece is “Shady”. 

The books on Hughes’ shelf show her interest in the gamut of art history; just a few noted are Egon Schiele, Francesco Clemente, Edward Munch, Clyfford Still. And as the controversial critic Robert Hughes said in an essay about Giorgio de Chirico, Shara’s personal iconography and symbolism may “condense voluminous feeling through metaphor and association. One can connect these magical nodes of experience, yet not find what makes them cohere.”

One painting I especially like is from her website, but wasn’t being shown. It’s a loosely painted gestural work that speaks to me of summer.

Thanks Shara and Ben – looking forward to the next Seek ATL salon.

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Good Growth Dekalb and their good fight

Posted on March 15, 2012 by Victoria

Good Growth Dekalb is a group of concerned citizens and neighbors who live in communities near Suburban Plaza, a 1960s shopping mall that’s been allowed to languish for over twenty years. There are some stores that have thrived despite the recent economic stress. Big Lots is the company’s most successful Atlanta location and Last Chance Thrift Store is beloved by many. Decatur Estate and Way Back Antiques does a good business and historic Onstage Atlanta has long attracted an audience in its theater space in the center.

AJC file. Suburban Plaza circa 1960.

The owner, Selig Enterprises, has found a willing tenant to anchor its proposed redevelopment; Walmart and a 149,000 square foot super-store. Neighborhood groups met earlier this fall to draw up non-binding concessions from the developer that other communities’ experiences suggest Walmart will never honor.

This is a plan from Selig with some concessions highlighted in red, courtesy of the Decatur Metro blog. Higher resolution here.

 

Good Growth Dekalb evolved out of many neighbors’ frustrations at questions that weren’t asked at any of the neighborhood association meetings, and a parking variance approval that went through without Dekalb county demanding any study, whether for the increased traffic or an environmental impact report. Since according to GADOT, over 70,000 vehicles travel Scott Blvd on a daily basis, an independent traffic impact study is one of the issues that GGD would like to address and the group hired a land use lawyer to investigate whether the county was remiss.

Last Saturday about 100 people marched in protest from Suburban Plaza to the Decatur Square. Musicians from the Atlanta Sedition Orchestra provided accompaniment. Press coverage included broadcasts from Channel 5 News and Channel 2, articles in the Atlanta Journal Constitution and the Avondale-Decatur Patch blog.

The Atlanta Sedition Orchestra plays for activism projects in Atlanta’s progressive community.

GGD’s mascot, the hard working Melanie Parker – who also writes our press releases.

WSB Channel 2’s Angelique Proctor interviews Brian Westlake, a resident in the area.

Fox News Channel 5 interviews Stacie Dixon, GGD’s fearless coordinator and the channel broadcast two clips of video on the event.

Decatur Mayor Bill Floyd spoke to the crowd and gave his support, although the city has no current jurisdiction over the Plaza.

State Representative and my neighbor Karla Drenner spoke to the crowd on Decatur Square, in support of GGD’s anti-Walmart stance and urged us to protest Senate Bill 469. The bill would make civil disobedience a felony in Georgia and is designed to weaken unions. Punishable by up to one year in jail, it would levy a fine of $1,000 on individuals and $10,000 on organizations. The bill passed the Senate on March 3.

A community forum was held on February 23 and the North Decatur Presbyterian Church auditorium was packed to standing room only with 300 people, some of whom spoke to the audience.

Volunteers from the Dekalb County Green Party and Atlanta IndyMedia helped shoot video for the forum and the March 10th walk.

One resident reminded us that corporate greed is only secondary to our willingness to buy cheap goods. That habit has to break before we can have equitable and sustainable forms of commerce.

Thomas Wheatley’s Walmart Cometh presents both the pros and cons of big-box stores in his cover story that came out today in Creative Loafing.

Good Growth Dekalb will be screening “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price”, 7:30PM on Sunday March 18th at PushPush Theater, 121 New Street, Decatur, 30030. Free, donations accepted.

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Alan Loehle, painter

Posted on February 25, 2012 by Victoria

I first met the painter Alan Loehle at a White Space gallery opening for his wife, the choreographer and performance artist Nicole Livieratos. The post on that event can be found here.

This interview doesn’t follow much of a traditional question and answer format, because Alan and I skipped around during my visit to his studio in late January, focusing more on individual paintings and drawings, his time in Rome and Brooklyn, and his tales about meeting the artists Louise Bourgeois and R.B. Kitaj.

In the separate large studio behind their historic home in Decatur, sharing mugs of his favorite English tea, and with Emmie-Lou, the family’s huge (and massively friendly) South African Mastiff joining us, we talked about his painting and how he works.

Emmie, guardian of the studio…and my new best friend.

Loehle has been painting for most of his adult life. Just ten years after graduating with an MFA from the University of Arizona, he received an NEA fellowship for painting. A couple of Pollock-Krasner grants later, he snagged a Guggenheim fellowship in 2007.

Loehle says that his work changed dramatically during and after his trip to Rome. In his statement he says,“the new paintings juxtapose cultural symbols, images from everyday life, art history and myriad other sources… They are an attempt to make sense of experience, to capture the bigness of being alive in the world, to somehow tickle the back corners of the viewer’s mind and spirit.” 

I asked him to explain some of his interests in painting, in terms of form and subject matter. Loehle says that while he isn’t interested in allegory per se, he believes that all great work inhabits space in a transcendent way and is inexplicable. The mystery or alchemy of painting resides in the materials he works with; oil, acrylic and oil pastels as the vehicle with which to communicate to us.

Rome Belvedere (Remembering Kitaj), 2008. Oil and paint stick on canvas 68.5 x 58.5 inches.

But more than that, Loehle works with emotional content. He tackles the big issues; lust, death, life. Few of his works are outright humorous, but those that are rock with color and conflict; the human condition as seen by an‘other’ creator; the artist. His objective to merge disparate elements and lose representational space, while referencing both ancient and modern mythology, results in fascinating juxtapositions.

In his 2011 painting ‘Correggio Kiss’, we see the graphically limned body of the Roman river nymph Io in the arms of the cloudlike Jupiter (the Roman goddess Juno’s unfaithful husband, disguised himself as a cloud to conceal the affair), along with a laughing monkey sitting at the lower left, a graffiti like phallus pointing out of the canvas frame and a large superimposed head over the entirety of the painting.

Correggio Kiss, 2011. Acrylic on canvas, 74 x 54.75 inches.

This is not only a painting about the irony of the human condition, Loehle has set up a formal conflict in the picture plane. There is no perspective, everything here is frontal.  The depth exists from graphic superimposition. We feel the tension and the problem, without knowing quite why. In this respect, as an emotional tour de force, Loehle succeeds. While Correggio was including the spectator in his painting by bringing it to eye level, he too dispensed with perspective and used overlapping elements to create depth.

Loehle appropriates graffiti and Mexican Day of the Dead symbolism in his work – there is local street artist iconography that he’s incorporated into some of the work, along with skulls and common poison symbolism. Some of the work has deeply personal references; the painting immediately below reflects on his father.

Death Painting, 2011. Acrylic on canvas, 74 x 54.75 inches.

Chaos I, 2010. Oil and paint stick on canvas, 49 x 38.5 inches. Photo courtesy Marcia Wood gallery.

There is a definite narrative in most of his work, despite its current focus on abstracting the figure. And there is a passionate release that seems to be evident in his most recent works. In a 1986 interview, the Italian painter Sandro Chia said that he had been through many ‘isms, but that he came out of it with the possibility to view a painting as “not just paint on a canvas, but as something else… A painting is not just an object: it has an aura again.”

In other words, the act of painting transforms ordinary life into a moment of transcendence. Loehle wants to make some kind of sense from all of these experiences, and during the process he tackles the big equations; life, sex and death. There is much symbolism in his work but his main preoccupation is with what he calls the disparate connection of representational space.

The painter Jim Herbert is a good friend of Loehle’s, and now lives in Brooklyn after teaching at the University of GA in Athens for decades. His axiom from an interview on the blog Two Coats of Paint seems to fit with Loehle’s process: “Art making can be a sensual, playful experience – but with the possibility of a wreck on every turn. Both hands on the wheel please.”

My questions began with Loehle’s influences.

VW I also see in your work a similarity to some of the figurative painters who became known in the late 1970’s and 1980’s, with their darkly rich palettes and focuses on death. Another Italian painter, Mimmo Paladino, comes to mind. You have one painting, “Remembering Kitaj”, titled as an obvious homage to the American painter R.B. Kitaj, who tragically took his own life in 2007. Can you talk about some of your influences?

AL In a way, everyone and no one. After so many years of thinking about art, there is a point where it is all inside you and you sort of put it away, but it’s still there. To be more specific, though – Willem de Kooning, because he was the real thing- the consummate painter; Richard Serra because his work is so powerfully distilled; and Piet Mondrian because of his metaphysical “rightness”.

VW You are currently an art professor at Oglethorpe University. How does academia and teaching figure into your life as a painter? Is there, in your teaching, any defined philosophy on art or what it means to develop as an artist? And to elaborate, can you discuss any core ideologies that you might have as a painter or the technical aspects of your work?

AL I guess the closest I can get (to a core ideology) would be that art-making is a serious endeavor- that it isn’t a game- even if there is a lightness or humor in the work; that it’s about things that matter in a fundamental way. In terms of your question about technical aspects, I will do pretty much whatever it takes to pull off a painting. The process has been full of surprises lately. I used to work in a very specific way, but not any more.

VW How do you stay current, and do you engage much with other artists in your community? I’ve recently attended a local salon of painters (Seek Atlanta), who regularly visit studios and discuss art and process.

AL I have been fortunate with travel- that’s probably the main way.  For example, on a trip to New York two summers ago I saw Christian Boltanski’s installation at the Park Avenue Armory. And then there are the art fairs; Frieze in London, Art Miami and others. Also, I am lucky to have friends from all over the country who are artists, writers, playwrights – we stay in touch.

VW Many artists are combining the traditional gallery system with a migration to an online ‘art retail’ option, much as books became ubiquitous as an Amazon model. Do you see the role of the internet as a challenge, or an opportunity for your future as an artist?

AL Re the internet – I need to do a lot more to expand exposure for my work and reach out to prospective audiences.

VW Your next solo exhibit is at the Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta in March. Talk about how you chose the works or your ideas about structuring the exhibition. Do you exhibit outside Atlanta as well?

AL Marcia and I will fine-tune our selections soon. We will first focus on the work we chose for the catalog, which are eight of the paintings from the Rome trip during the Guggenheim Fellowship. Then we will have to think about what drawings (both pencil and oil pastel from the sketchbooks) will add context. In terms of showing outside Atlanta, I have exhibited a fair bit over the years but right now, I don’t. It is a priority to me to get this work out.

Alan Loehle’s work can be seen at the Marcia Wood Gallery, opening March 16th, 2012 from 6-9pm. You can also find his work online at The Drawing Center.

 

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Kronos Quartet and new music

Posted on February 18, 2012 by Victoria

Emory’s Schwartz Center brought the Kronos Quartet to Atlanta last night for an evening of transcendent, or as we used to say in the ’60s, mind-blowing music. In addition, the audience had a chance to see the Azerbaijan Alim Qasimov Ensemble, whose Mugham indigenous classical music included spirited vocal duets accompanied by the tar, a long-necked lute, daf (frame drums), kamancha (spike fiddle) and what appeared to be a clarinet.

This is one of the pieces that Kronos and Qasimov’s ensemble performed together, titled ‘Getme, Getme’, which means ‘Don’t leave, don’t leave’ and was written by Said Rustamov (1907-1983).

Kronos Quartet & Alim Qasimov Ensemble – Getme, Getme (Said Rustamov, Azerbaijan) from Kronos Quartet on Vimeo.

Kronos played three works before the Qasimov Ensemble appeared onstage. The first piece was my favorite, a composition by American composer Michael Gordon titled ‘Clouded Yellow’. Gordon says the title refers to the term for mass migrations of butterflies in England, ‘clouded yellow years’. Gordon’s quote from the program notes: “I love the image of a cloud of bright yellow butterflies, and I think the word ‘clouded’ describes the blurred harmonies and melodies of this piece…I imagined I was flying around on a butterfly, gliding in the air, the air dense with moisture, like in a rainforest. It was all very free and fanciful, like a travelogue around a garden.”

Here’s a bit of the composition from the Dartmouth archives and an interview with Gordon here. You can also listen to him talking about some of his work in these clips from an interview on WQXR.

Kronos also performed a dynamic piece called ‘Aheym’ (Homeward) by composer and National Band member Bryce Dessner and a Philip Glass arrangement of Bob Dylan’s ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’ that they had played at Glass’s 75th birthday party in January. The Dylan piece was an eclectic and humorous mashup of what sounded like screaming Hawaiian slide guitars and a mouth harp.

I had the chance to meet Kronos cellist Jeffrey Zeigler at the reception after the performance. Coincidentally my good friend, video artist Ali Hossaini, has been collaborating on a new opera written by Zeigler’s wife Paola Prestini, an accomplished composer listed on NPR’s the Mix, 100 Composers under 40.

Since no CD’s were being sold at the event, Zeigler graciously offered to mail me a signed copy of their 2011 CD, Music of Vladimir Martynov, which recently made Album of the Week on WQXR’s Q2 Music:

“Moving back to the album’s beginning is a quick five-and-a-half minute The Beatitudes, which beams with religious ecstasy and provides an easy gateway to the meatier subjects. Enter with fortitude, but expect euphoria.”

The CD includes three works by the Russian composer written or rescored for the quartet, and also received high praise from music critics. The LATimes reviewed  it last year, and I am anxious to hear the magnificent ‘Beatitudes’ in full. You can hear a snippet at the Kronos website.

 

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Seek ATL, a studio visit

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Victoria

Like myself, Shara Hughes and Ben Steele are artists who have relocated to or moved back to Atlanta. In an effort to engage with more kindred spirits in the area, they recently set up a monthly salon for artists – painters, arts writers and curators are invited to visit a different artist’s studio on a Sunday afternoon.  The audience last weekend at Marc Brotherton’s ACAC studio consisted solely of artists and lent itself to a discussion focused on formalized theory and process. There have been casual arts gatherings before in Atlanta, but having this type of structure is a welcome addition.

Involved in ACAC’s studio artist program for the last three years, Brotherton is nearing the end of his stay and will probably be moving his studio into his Decatur home later in the spring. We chatted about the advantage of working from home, rather than having to commute. Because he has a young child, he may be building his studio ‘garage’ within shouting distance from the house. A couple of other artists from the program, Dayna Thacker and Nancy VanDevender, strolled over from their studios, giving the gathering a more community feel.

Painters are not known for their ability to verbalize their work, but some of the burden of understanding modern art must be shifted to the viewer. What needs to go is the expectation of a narrative to suss out the nuances of anything more abstract than an obvious landscape or figure. It’s tough to talk about art or technique or intent when the whole shebang has to be condensed or deconstructed for the sake of clarity and brevity. Artists speak the same language.

But still, trying to discuss art with any non-artist is usually an exercise in frustration. As the folks at this gathering agreed, most people want to know what we do, or how we make a living, or whether we’re actually selling our work. That we’re engaged in a creative act that is of the culture and can change it, seems to forever be beside the point.

The painter Walter Darby Bannard’s introduction to a 2008 book on artist Brian Rutenberg elaborates on this dilemma and touches on similar points that were brought up in Sunday’s salon:

Another common notion is that an artwork is “profound” by virtue of the story it has to tell and, if the work is nonrepresentational, by the “meaning” it conveys. We are willing to be moved by music despite its lack of reference to nature because we are used to it; we don’t ask it to be full of birds chirping and auto horns. 

Visual art, on the other hand, was made to be referential and did not move away from depicting the real world until recently – during the last hundred years or so. So instead of yielding to the sensuous characteristics of a work, to its beauty, if you will, people tend to look first, for what it says. That is what motivated the academic artists of the nineteenth century, and it is what motivates Postmodernists today.

Yet despite this almost universal initial misconception, basic visual strength has, in the long run, always won out over explicit meaning. In the final analysis, content is unimportant as art. What counts is how the art was made and what the artist has put into to it beyond content; those visual characteristics are the basis of its quality. For example, every image of the Crucifixion is loaded with clear-cut, specific, understandable content and meaning, but very few such images manage to last as great art.

Brotherton revealed a few influences (Stella, Albers), described his background and did a great job of talking about his process. While artists are deeply familiar with technique and their materials, they rarely know where they’re going. That’s the beautiful mystery and alchemy of painting. Brotherton is admittedly, no exception.

He noted that the artist Thomas Nozkowski has maintained that ‘oil painting loves to be changed’, and it’s true that we painters all love to manipulate our materials. Where do we get our inspiration? Usually from anywhere and everywhere, the flotsam of life. In this interview Nozkowski describes a moment’s decision to depict evocative feelings – which may or may not infiltrate a painting.

Some of Brotherton’s work has to do with genetic disorders in his own family. Or it may reflect current political movements, like Occupy Atlanta. There was speculation about ‘revolt’ mirrored in much of his text driven pieces. One work in particular suggests a particular action that Brotherton offers for one political party, but the type is so tiny that most viewers will miss it from afar. I’m not telling, you’ll have to wait for him to show here in Atlanta. These pieces are going off to Brooklyn for a spring exhibit.

Marc noted that while artists are expected to develop a consistent body of work, he wasn’t interested in remaining static. His explorations with black glitter on canvas echo tarmac or a long stretch of highway at night, and his flourescent ‘spots’ of plasticky, peeled off paint from a palette that are glued onto the canvas, along with upcycled styrofoam pieces confirm a wide array of experimentation. Offering the example of musicians, whose work can change dramatically throughout their careers, he countered the idea of a singular path for the painter.

I asked about Josef Albers because many of Marc’s paintings consist of colored rectangles, the color dynamics as predominant as the form or structure of his assemblaged or overlaid works. Joannes Itten was Albers‘ teacher at the Bauhaus, and Itten’s classic book, The Elements of Color, was my first in depth commitment to learning color theory. Itten posits fascinating cultural tidbits about color, and he saw relationships between color and music.

Symbolism and schematics are used as communicative elements in the work, and Brotherton says he’s interested in information and how the currents of digital bits infiltrate our lives.

Brotherton will be showing most of these works at his upcoming show at Causey Contemporary in Brooklyn from April 20 – May 27.

Thanks Shara and Ben – looking forward to the next Seek ATL salon.

Check out Seek ATL on Facebook.

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Tier IV and new paintings

Posted on February 1, 2012 by Victoria

My neighborhood is finally gentrifying. A white barred owl sat in my street the other night as I pulled into the driveway and I realized she’d probably been displaced by all the tree removal behind my back 40. My property lies between the city of Avondale and unincorporated Dekalb county. For now there is no comprehensive or overall plan in place; this area would probably be considered a free for all for builders and developers, if they had any money. When I bought the property in 1987, this area wasn’t on anyone’s radar – and not even the usual suspects (artists) had pegged it as a great place to set down roots.

During the 14 years that I was away working in other states, my neighbors got together over changes to the zoning, when developers wanted to build a ridiculous number of houses per lot. At the height of the real estate boom, a few people sold their relatively large tracts of land, one couple behind me sold an acre. Some neighbors fought what is now called a Scottdale Tier IV Overlay, but most were willing to lose the + hundred year old trees and put in large three story houses. Preserving the integrity and historical value of a community is not only mostly unwanted, but largely misunderstood in these parts.

All of that is a preface to my new paintings. Since the bulldozers have come in, along with whatever machine is able to tear out huge tree roots, orange safety fencing and swaths of the last green brush have been creeping into my work. My studio overlooks the construction sites and the 5th and last house’s basement is being excavated this week.

I’m not happy about the development, although as an artist I get the visual boost of the orange fencing. And in much of my work, this conflict between urbanization and the pastoral beauty of place becomes a character. The displacement of birds, trees and/or homeless winos, along with the lower end of the population is the result of what some call ‘progress’.

High Density- work in progress. Oil on canvas, 28″ x 34″ 2012.

High Density, close-up.

Barrier. Oil and acrylic on canvas panel, 16″ x 20″ 2012.

Horizon. Acrylic on canvas 7.5″ x 7.5″ 2012.

December 1, 2011.

February 1, 2012.

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